


Said the Magpie to the Rook

by LittleRedCosette



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Double Agent Clint Barton, Falling In Love, Heartbreak, Hydra Clint Barton, Moral Ambiguity, Moral Dilemmas, Non-Linear Narrative, Non-con themes, Post-Avengers (2012), SHIELD Agent Clint Barton, Slow Burn, Undercover Missions, Uneasy Allies, Violence, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:41:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24553291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: “You want to know why Fury recruited me to SHIELD, Cap?”Steve nods his head, and somehow manages to make it look like a no but Clint, he tells him anyway, because he has to. Steve deserves the truth, now. God knows, he’s had nothing but lies so far.“Because HYDRA got to me first. And I didn’t exactly say no.”*In the aftermath of Loki, with SHIELD cracked wide open by his own two hands, Clint Barton will do whatever it takes to make amends.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Avengers Team, Clint Barton & Brock Rumlow, Clint Barton & Hydra Agents, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Nick Fury, Clint Barton/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton, James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Clint Barton/Phil Coulson - Relationship
Comments: 28
Kudos: 126





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> OK friends, look. Just listen, alright? It's not my fault. It's not my fault!
> 
> I have half finished works, AO3 and otherwise, all over the place. I have unmet deadlines and I have editorials to finish. But this won't go away. It just won't. I've ignored it for _months._ I wrote a fourth draft of five chapters in one fell swoop and I don't know why or how but it just happened. Please forgive me.
> 
> This is about the closest I feel I've gotten to including a _Dead Dove_ in a fic. I haven't tagged it as such, because I'm legit going to address the issues at hand. But it will take time. And It's definitely not a HYDRA Trash Party. Clint's in a problematic position here. And the romance is a real slow burn. It's all just going to take some time.
> 
> I'm going to try rechannel my energy into some useful updates now. Wish me luck.
> 
> And please, please, take good care of yourselves, your loved ones, and any strangers you come across in these tremendously difficult times.
> 
> Yours  
> LRCxx

*

** prologue **

*

**(two years ago)**

*

The safehouse has been compromised.

Clint can tell immediately, before he’s even unlatched the back window to sneak in.

It’s dark, and Clint is tired, tired in his very bone marrow. The blood smeared under his fingernails is still wet and the bandage around his ankle is loose already. He’s tired, in need of sleep, and more than that. He’s tired of this assignment, of everything about it.

He wants to be back in New York. He wants to sleep for more than an hour in one go. He wants to eat ten cheeseburgers, a potato farm of fries and drink a bottle of mustard. Instead, he’s pretty much as far from New York as it’s humanly possible to be without leaving the atmosphere, he’s been taking power naps for days, and the only food within twenty kilometres is either dripping in tahini or is whatever-the-fuck desert equivalent of roadkill.

It’s obvious that the safehouse has been compromised, but he slips inside anyway, legs flailing over the kitchen sink, wincing as he lands with too much weight on his bad leg. Pain shoots up to his knee and he traps the hiss between his teeth.

He shuts the window behind him, for all the lick of difference it will make, scanning the dark kitchen. Whoever’s inside will have heard him the moment he hit the shriek-creak of the window being forced open.

Clint glances around the kitchen, at the chair left at an angle, the door too wide open leading to a tattered, equally dark living room.

The entire floor of the one storey house is silent.

Dropping his quiver and folded bow to the floor, Clint trudges to the fridge and pulls it open with a rattle of glass bottles.

“Want a beer?” he calls out, not too loudly. “Left some Heineken here last time. Dry country my _ass.”_

When he pulls two green bottles out, condensation slides instantly down their labels in the hot air. He’s not entirely sure he bothered fixing the AC after last time it broke. Now probably isn’t the time to check.

Clint cracks the beer caps off with his teeth and leaves one on the table, taking a long pull of the other. He closes his eyes against the dizzy fizz spell as he drinks, listening carefully to the faint shuffle of movement as the alcohol scrapes down his raw throat.

When he opens his eyes, someone is standing in the doorway.

It’s not who he thought it would be. Not in the slightest.

“Sparrow?” he murmurs, frowning at the figure in the entry to his kitchen.

The woman nods, fluttery as a ghost and makes a grab for the Heineken. Barely sips it before grimacing.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Whittock?” Clint asks her.

Marta Whittock is a wickedly smart Level Two SHIELD Agent. One of Clint’s favourites from Agent Melinda May’s prime stock.

Her range scores are no threat to Clint’s own, but he’d be the first to say she’s good, _really_ good. Not to mention a popular candidate for the next round-up of STRIKE assets, and one of very few Agents to get the fabled _Coulson Nod_ within her first year in the field.

Now, there’s a current of something else undercutting her steely calm. Her face is drawn, and though her hands aren’t shaking, they are white knuckling the bottle she’s holding.

 _Clarice,_ the supervisors called her when she was in training, and it didn’t take long for Clint to figure out why. Unfortunately, _Starling_ did not make it to SHIELD’s list of approved monikers.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Clint tells her when she does little more than glance at his quiver when he speaks.

“I know,” Sparrow tells him.

“How did you even find me?”

“I had to,” she says, affronted. Her nose scrunches up distasteful at the insinuation. “It’s important.”

Clint grins despite himself, gesturing for her to return to the living room, where he follows her to the sofa. It’s sunken and motheaten, as unwelcoming as it gets even though the lamps that he turns on emit a warm, rosy glow. Sparrow turns one of them back off again.

When she sits down, it’s almost too close. Her knee brushes Clint’s and he can smell the sand-damp of her clothes. He ignores the impulse to take hold of her wrist.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” he asks.

Sparrow shakes her head furiously.

Clint believes her. The fact that she found him in the first place is astonishing. He’s been off grid for over a week, hasn’t officially checked in with Koenig in nearly two by now. Either Whittock’s been holding out on SHIELD, or she really is desperate enough to pull off the impossible.

Either way she’ll be Level Three by Christmas, Clint just knows it. Looks like he’s up forty dollars on Sitwell and Everett.

“I’ve found something,” Sparrow says, then pauses, glancing around again.

“This is my place,” Clint reassures her. “SHIELD has no ears here.”

Sparrow’s face softens just a little, her hand reaching up to push the red bangs off her face, revealing a scattering of dark freckles.

Clint rests his elbow on the couch cushions, facing her a little easier. It’s unnerving to see the downward shape of her mouth, to have her relieved by the absence of SHIELD. For all she’s successfully projecting an air of _dutifully concerned,_ Clint can read the terror in her quietness. She scratches at her bottom lip, leaving a pink mark at the corner of her mouth.

“SHIELD isn’t what we think it is.”

The graveness of her voice, its tremor like dirt hitting a coffin. It reaches his bones, the look in her eyes a fist in his gut.

Clint holds his breath.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and the words cut his mouth to shreds. He can taste the blood of her honesty.

Sparrow takes a bigger gulp of her beer, licks her lips and breathes through her nose once, twice, then. Then.

“I think there is a faction of HYDRA working from inside SHIELD.”

Clint blinks.

He nearly drops the bottle from his slippery fingers and they both flinch at his sudden move to catch it. Nearly laugh at themselves only, they don’t, they can’t. Not under the weight of Whittock’s words looming over and between them, sucking the oxygen from the room like a living, breathing threat.

HYDRA. How could she possibly think it?

Clint stares at her face, young, not so very much younger than himself but he remembers being her age, wasn’t half the person she is now, bolshy, brazen, brilliant. He doesn’t insult her intelligence with doubt of her suspicions. He does, however, wonder why the _fuck_ she’d rather track him down to the ass-end of the Middle East to confide in him than take this to Koenig or Coulson or May, all of whom are safely ensconced in their Stateside offices.

Unless, of course, she thinks there’s a chance one or more of them are HYDRA, too.

Whittock adds, as if perhaps Clint might not think her word enough: “I have proof. It was Rollins, his mission report after Martinez’s witness showed up dead in Finland. It didn’t make sense. I did some digging and I found some things. Some – not good things. Discrepancies.”

Clint runs a hand over his face. Dread is clogging up his throat, making it incredibly unpleasant to breathe, to speak, to exist. His thoughts burn quickly through him, weighing up all the possible replies he could give.

“Have you told anyone else?” he asks in as even and low a tone as he can manage.

He looks at her, overcast with shadows. She picks at the label of her beer and he watches her, the flutter of her copper bangs and the slope of her wonky cupid’s bow.

“I came straight to you,” she tells him and his heart sinks in his chest, plummets like granite through his stomach when she continues, “I’m on leave, anyway. Mandatory, after the mix-up in Santa Fey. Nobody even knows I’m gone.”

Marta Whittock, so good, so fucking _good._

“Shit,” Clint says into his clammy palm, muffled, annoyed. He feels helpless and breathless, lost like the blue of her eyes.

His left hand slips tighter around his Heineken and he sinks it in three large gulps, stalling a response.

She looks at him, Sparrow. Heavy-faced, desperate, trusting. Clint’s never been one for God, or praying, but he knows the power of human faith. Knows it, the Achilles Heel of even the best of fighters.

“Shit,” he says again, louder, to her puzzlement.

Sparrow is good, Clint will be the first to say. But she’s not as good as him.

She sees him move, and in her surprise, her absolutely bewilderment, she’s no match for his speed.

Clint rips the handgun cleanly from the unclipped holster strapped to his calf, lifts it in a smooth arc, and shoots once even as both her hands wrap instinctively around his forearm.

The bullet goes through the inner corner of her right eyebrow. It’s a small enough calibre, but the brutal force of point-blank range punches her face apart. The sound bellows through the house, an unmistakeable _crack,_ he won’t be able to stay and yet, _yet._

He stares at her, Sparrow, Whittock, _Marta,_ a second too long. The memory of her half-vanished face burns into his retinas. Her copper bangs singed, blood soaked, her limbs inelegant over the cushions of the musty sofa, Heineken pooling out on the floor at her feet amidst the shattered bottle.

It takes him forty seconds to sweep the house, another twenty-five to answer his angrily buzzing phone.

 _“A fucking gun, asshole?”_ the man on the other end says.

It might be Morley, he can’t remember. Can’t _remember._

“Paperwork!” he snarls back, hoarse, terrified.

Clint’s innards are itching jelly. The house is remote, there’s not even a store in this sorry excuse for _town,_ but the desert is a silent, terrifyingly friendless place to be stranded. He’s got no transport for another few hours yet and soon they’ll be swarming the street, he’s got no time –

“Job’s done,” he retorts shortly before a response can be formed. “Get some clean-up in before they find her, or someone will have Foxtrot on speed-dial within the hour.”

It’s pitch black in the alley he limps down at a pace. He can hear muffled sounds through the walls, can’t see a doorway to speak of. In his left hand, hidden in his pocket, the edges of Marta’s SHIELD ID are cutting his palm, warm and wet with blood from his fingers.

_“Barton – Barton – do you copy?”_

“I copy,” Clint lies, helpless, breathless, lost like Whittock’s blue blood eyes. Furious, with himself, with her.

 _“Good,”_ the man on the phone says – paperwork, fucking _paperwork –_ all ice and anger. Definitely Morley. _“You did well, Barton.”_

“Thank you, sir,” Clint says, sand rustling over his combat boots, the thick humidity of the night swelling in his throat.

He stares into the distant T of the street end, the wink of lights hazy in his blurred vision. His heart tastes of metal in his mouth and his quiver, a thousand times heavier on his back.

 _“Hail HYDRA,”_ Morley says in a clipped, reassuring tone of confidence. Sly, like tests, like confidants.

Clint closes his eyes.

“Hail HYDRA,” he replies, all but silent, into the growing mayhem of the night.

*


	2. PART ONE: Chapter I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick briefing for you dear, dear readers:
> 
> This story is in **four parts**. I don't like it as a series, so all four parts are going to be in this one story. My best estimate is approx 10 chapters per part. Could be more, could be less. For any newcomers, please be aware, my stories spiral out of control very fast. (See: literally anything else I've written on AO3.)
> 
> With great love in these hard times. Be safe, be kind.
> 
> LRCxx

*

** PART ONE **

** Chapter I **

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

The coffee gets cold too quickly, but otherwise, the diner is one of their better meeting spots.

It’s the AC that does it. Come rain or shine, the AC is blasting below forty. Heaven in the thick of July, bitter hell in December, when the snow lies thick over the cartops and the roadsides are death traps of slush.

It’s closing in on June, now, and the cool air is welcome enough but the coffee, it’s freaking cold already. Clint drinks it anyway, mouthfuls of bitter, watching Cecelia flit from table to table with her usual, butterfly grace.

She’s a good kid; nineteen going on thirty, three jobs and just about the nicest laugh on the East Coast. It’s a loud, syllabic ringing that moves her entire upper body. She’s got a two-year-old who’s fed mostly on her tips. Clint met him, once. Alessio. Not enough puppy fat for a toddler, big brown eyes like his mama, a full head of dark hair that curls over his brow in fat ringlets. He stays with his nonna when he’s not with her.

His daddy’s taking up space in Calvary Cemetery, but according to the scar on Cecelia’s lip, he won’t be missed.

Catching Clint’s eye, Cecelia walks the long route back to the counter, so she can top up his coffee. Her bare arms are covered in goosebumps and her mascara has smudged over one temple, a rogue sideways track that she wipes at with the side of her hand.

“Sure I can’t get you some eggs, or fries, Frank?”

“No thanks, Cee,” Clint replies for the fourth time, just as the door of the diner tinkles open. He nods at the stooping newcomer and adds: “We’ll be needing another cup, though.”

Cecelia glances over her shoulder, spinning her whole body at the sight of her latest customer and smiling big.

Clint’s pretty sure Cecelia’s the only person in the world who smiles that big for Brock Rumlow. She’s definitely the only person Rumlow smiles back at, all teeth and crinkle-eyed, real as her own.

“I could kill for one of those omelettes, sweetheart,” Rumlow says as he slides into the booth opposite Clint.

He’s got a strange kind of charm, does Rumlow. A way of rolling his vowels to sound either threatening or inviting, depending on how he pleases. He’s not so much handsome as he is magnetic. Occasionally, Clint gets taken off-guard by it, feels the pull behind his bellybutton to snap to it, like he’s one of Rumlow’s ALPHAs.

“Sure thing, Ryan,” Cecelia replies, returning quickly with a cup of coffee that Rumlow thanks her for with significantly more sincerity than he gave Clint four months ago when he saved Rumlow’s life.

Cecelia returns to the counter, greeting a young couple that are huddled together near the till, and it’s only after three large gulps of the good stuff that Rumlow looks up at Clint properly, his hard eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he eyes him over, from his untamed hair to his hunched shoulders. It’s been less than ten days since they last met up. Used to be that once a month was generous, but that was _before._

It’s different now, and Clint thinks a lot of things are about to change in the aftermath.

Clint’s an Avenger now, for one thing.

For another, Clint’s publicly killed SHIELD agents. Lots of them.

He’s being hung up to dry by the World Security Council for it, to boot, because according to them, mind control isn’t a valid excuse for a trained operative.

Apparently, they’re not the only ones. The only difference is, while the WSC are demanding they paint the walls red with Clint’s insides, it seems Clint’s just inadvertently skipped rounds five through ten of auditions for HYDRA’s inner circle, and by the look on Rumlow’s face behind his coffee cup, it’s gotten him more than a little bit _noticed._

Years, goddamn _years_ of milk runs and rogue bullets and playing musical statues with these guys, and finally they’re actually paying attention. If Clint had known, he might have smashed up a Helicarrier sooner.

Rumlow rests his forearms on the table, shoulders pulled up and it has the countereffect of shrinking him. For such a big guy, he’s awful good at acting small. When he speaks, it’s a voice of teeth and nails.

“Sorry about Coulson.”

“Are you?” Clint asks, eyebrows arched.

Rumlow smirks. One of those ugly ones, the dangerous ones. The kind he saves for –

“Fury’s one good eye, right?” he sneers, the oldest fable of SHIELD. Even the ones that disliked Coulson knew better than to disrespect him. “What’s he gonna do now?”

“Go blind, I guess,” Clint drawls.

Rumlow snorts, thumbs tight around his coffee cup.

“You getting a new handler?”

Clint drains his coffee; leaning his head back, he feels the pull on the new scar over his ribs. He clipped the stitches himself yesterday, possibly a bit too eager to be rid of them. The skin feels tender, though not inflamed.

“Fury knows better,” he says as he shakes his head. “Any case, that’s assuming they don’t put me in front of a firing squad first.”

In all the time Clint’s known Brock Rumlow, he’s never been a guy easily agitated. He’s too physically powerful to be intimidated, and he knows too many of other people’s secrets to feel outclassed. Now though, looking sideways, showing his profile as his eyes track Cecelia along the counter, there’s a tightness in his jaw.

“Nobody’s executing you, Barton,” he says, very carefully.

The syllables are fashioned into hard lines, forming a threat as potent as his fists.

This is the thing about Brock Rumlow.

Brock is first and foremost a bully. Second, a mercenary. Third, a thief. Underneath that, though, there’s a ferocious current of something less easily defined; not soft enough to be affectionate, not overt enough to be possessive. Closer to pride than genuine loyalty.

Clint is not his mark anymore, nor is he a mere ally. They’ve spent years working together. They’ve been rivals and they’ve been allies and four months ago Clint killed a man before he could stick a knife in Rumlow’s neck and six months before _that_ Rumlow broke protocol to pull Clint out of a burning jet.

This is probably the closest thing to friendship a man like Brock Rumlow has ever sustained, and he means it, sitting here in this freezing diner whispering in low tones. Nobody is executing Clint Barton and if they try, God help them, they’ll have to get through Rumlow first.

Clint is about half a second away from making an insincere comment about his expendability when they are saved face by Cecelia sliding a plate neatly in front of Rumlow, along with several slices of toast. He graces her with another generous grin. She tops up their cups, pulling a face at Clint when he accepts his seventh coffee but still refuses the eggs, and leaves them to it.

The omelette is buttery, and the smell of salty meat in the rising steam wafts a thick barrier across the table.

Rumlow eats like drowning, both his coffee and Clint promptly forgotten.

Clint, for his part, is glad of the brief reprieve.

It’s been fifteen days since Loki’s attack, with his sceptre and his eyes and his voice, his hunger for dominance and his petulant violence. Clint’s exhausted. Ever since his mandatory forty-eight hours in SHIELD Medical following the fight, he’s been catnapping in stints of forty-five or less, the bottle of pills Dr Adams prescribed him readily tossed to the back of his bathroom cabinet along with all the others.

He’s supposed to go back for a check-up in two days, had sworn his very own oath to Adams that he would.

It won’t be the first time Adams has been let down by a patient. Hell, it won’t be the first time he’s been let down by Clint.

Between blinks, Rumlow finishes wolfing down the omelette, wipes the corners of his mouth with his thumb and groans as he picks up a slice of the toast to soak up some of the remnant oil. He looks, abruptly, exhausted.

“Been double-shifting all week,” he says pointedly, stifling a yawn.

Clint smirks.

“Everybody’s overtime just went up,” he replies dryly. “You’re welcome.”

Rumlow lets out another snort.

“Fucking steel, man,” he says, the corner of his mouth curling upwards. “Kept sweet Nicholas J alive, though. Don’t think I’d have had the restraint.”

Clint shrugs, reaching over to help himself to a slice of Rumlow’s toast. It’s wholegrain, slathered in butter, a perfect shade of golden brown.

“Better the devil you know,” he says with a sniff of nonchalance. “Not like I wanted to risk the Queen of Hearts taking his place.”

Maria Hill had come to see him in Medical, four hours into his lockdown. She’d been the one to tell him, to break the news of what the fight had cost them, and it’s difficult not to imagine her and Natasha playing rock, paper, scissors, to see who had the displeasure. She’s never really warmed to him, over the years. It was probably easier that way.

Clint can still remember meeting her, back when the wind was rushing through her hair as she fast-tracked her way into the Deputy Director position with all the lethal grace at her disposal. He’d not taken kindly to being interviewed by a woman with a face that looked several years his junior.

She’d not taken kindly to being called a little girl, either, as it turned out.

Clint eats the slice of toast in his hand, his stomach instantly suspicious, judging by the way it grumbles, and waits for Rumlow to get to the point.

“Fury’s taken you off-duty,” he eventually says, not quite idle in the way he tilts his head.

“I’m a walking cautionary tale, now,” Clint reminds him with a cheer of his coffee.

Rumlow rolls his eyes.

“You’ve always been that, Barton.”

It’s so close to the kind of thing Natasha would say that for a moment Clint feels it in his lungs like smoke, choking him. Rumlow doesn’t seem to notice.

“You bored yet?”

It’s Clint’s turn to smirk, and he does. He feels it like sweat on his upper lip.

“I’ve been bored since ’98.”

Rumlow nods slow, considering with a token smirk. Rotates his coffee cup on the table. The air between them, still scented with buttered eggs and chorizo, is charged, a low and not entirely friendly voltage.

“I got something,” he says, quietlike. “Could keep you entertained.”

When Clint joined SHIELD, nine years ago, he met Rumlow in a training room, and Rumlow had had this look, this voice. Curiosity and greed, that magnetic pull that makes Cecelia blush, that makes the rest of ALPHA STRIKE snap to it on his command.

Clint knows twelve ways to break a man’s neck, and he learned seven of them from the man sitting opposite him now.

“Yeah?” he asks, blunt and attentive. He’s careful not to be eager, always careful with Rumlow. The guy can scent earnestness like a dog to a bone.

Another little nod, a calculation. The kind Clint recognises from his own hands on a bow.

“You got time?” Rumlow asks, x-ray stare.

Clint does not flinch, has never needed to. He’s armed only with his sly, taciturn nature and it’s more than enough. It’s always been more than enough.

“I’ll cancel my date with the hangman,” Clint replies, just to see the pinch of Rumlow’s displeased mouth.

For three elastic band seconds, they stare back at each other, mirrors on all angles, right up until the moment snaps back with a sting. Rumlow blinks, pulls a wallet out of his weather-beaten leather jacket and stares at the contents.

It’s subtle, the way his hand moves, wallet to cup, easy. He tips his invisible hat at Clint, gets up to leave, stopping at the till to hand a fifty-dollar bill to Cecelia, murmuring something to her that makes her beam.

The problem with bad guys, Clint thinks to himself as he watches Rumlow walk out the door, is that they are rarely one hundred percent _bad guys._

Clint shifts the plate and cups around on the table, until he ends up with Rumlow’s cup in his hands. He pulls the sealed plastic bag out of the cup, pressing the flat shape of the sim card into his palm.

He stands up, pretending not to feel the violent protest his back and left leg give at the movement. He pulls a fifty out of his wallet and hands it to Cecelia with a nod.

“Treat Alessio for me,” he says to her responding smile.

She’s breath-taking, really. With her bronze eyelashes and her dainty features; the scars on her knuckles and the tattoos on her wrists. Clint will be damned if he’s going to leave her a smaller tip than Brock.

“G’night, Frank,” she says, waving him off. “And eat something, for Heaven’s sake!”

He salutes her as he leaves, stepping out of the ice box diner, into the warm air of downtown Queens.

If he leaves now, he could still beat Natasha to Stark’s.

He stands in the middle of the street, eyes to the sky which is purpling at the edges, clouds thin over the descending evening, no rips in space to reveal galaxies unobserved by man.

The Chitauri never got this far. Loki had wanted the world for all eternity. Clint had given him a Helicarrier and a pocket of Manhattan for less than a day.

He puts Rumlow’s sim card in his pocket and makes his way down towards the subway, hood pulled up over his head, bruises pulsing. From inside his jacket, his phone vibrates with a text, which he holds close to his face as he takes a detour around the back of a subway station.

_Pick up milk while you’re out._

Clint almost smiles at it, can hear it in Natasha’s voice, dry ice smoking.

If anything’s going to get him feeling back to normal, it’s getting talked down to by his partner. He deletes Natasha’s text without answering, removes the sim and replaces it with Rumlow’s. As he waits for the phone to reload, a sudden darting movement out of the corner of his eye sets his teeth on edge. He looks up.

Across the street, a kid is crouched halfway behind a dumpster, undoubtedly thinking she’s well hidden. From between her knees, a small white snout pokes out.

Clint sighs, pocketing his phone and crossing over to the other side with a casual gait and his empty hands easily visible.

Before his feet reach the sidewalk, both the kid’s knees and the dog’s face vanish.

He stands at the alleyway entrance, staring down at the half-lit shadow.

 _Walk away, Barton,_ he tries very hard to tell himself, but it’s too late. He’d recognise that hunched profile anywhere. His heart sinks, presses disappointed into the gaps of his ribs.

“Hey, kid,” he says, none too loudly, interrupted by the snuffling of a hungry dog and the scuff of feet over newspapers.

“Go away,” a voice retorts, shrill and angry and when Clint peers around the dumpster, she’s got the dog in her lap, arms curled around the smiling sucker. Her own face is hidden behind layers of scarf and hood.

When he doesn’t do as she so politely requested, the girl’s knuckles curl up, bloody and bruised.

“I said _fuck off,_ pervert. I’m not selling.”

Clint raises his eyebrows, stepping easily back until he’s on the opposite wall from the girl and sliding down it, to mirror her. Except he doesn’t have a dog in his lap, which is a real shame, but definitely not the priority.

“Actually, you said _go away,”_ he points out, reasonably certain the kid has no weapon to launch at him for being mouthy. “And what is it that you’re not selling, exactly?”

“Anythin’,” she snarls, her cut lip curling.

But her legs draw closer to her torso, and she pulls the dog to her chest with possessive fear. He’s a terrier of some kind, at least partly Staffordshire by the look of him, and he seems no more than a year old despite the nasty scars on his face.

When she finally looks up, she pulls at her scarf with her bloody fingers, revealing a bruised scowl and hard brown eyes.

Clint smiles, waiting for her to speak.

That is, until the dog whines a little, burrowing himself into her open jacket. Her very, very familiar jacket.

 _“That’s_ where it went! You stole my fucking jacket, too?” he asks, and a laugh drops out with his accusation despite himself.

“You’ve got like twenty jackets,” the girl snaps back, her growly face twitching.

“Actually, I had four. Now I have three.”

At this, she wraps the jacket in question tighter around the dog, still refusing to look Clint in the eye.

He sighs quietly, crossing his legs to sit fully on the ground.

“Katie-Kate,” he says, much quieter than before. “What are you doing here?”

Her fingers, smoothing around the dog’s ears, are trembling a little.

“What do you mean?” she asks, still mustering up some anger from somewhere, which is honestly a little baffling, because Clint’s pretty sure he’s the one who’s supposed to be angry right now. All he feels is simultaneously relieved to see her alive and devastated to see her at all.

“I mean, you must’a stole at least three hundred dollars from my fuckin’ cookie jar last time. What are you doing here?”

Kate breathes loudly through her nose, her eyes still on the dumb dog’s smiling face.

“What are _you_ doing here, _Hawkeye?”_ she asks.

There’s a big ugly smirk on her face that Clint can’t cave to, although she’s right. It is a very big problem that she’s seen him here, but not for Clint, not _really._ She’s going to get herself killed if she keeps sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong, and Clint is not prepared to carry this kid on his conscience along with everyone else weighing it down these days.

“You got a place to stay?” he asks, and it’s a small victory, but only because she finally looks at him. Even if it is to throw him a sarcastic expression of _What do you think?_ Clint smiles. “Yeah, thought so. You realise my spare key is in the same place it always is, right? You could’ve come back any time you wanted.”

“Oh my God, you’re so _stupid!”_ Kate yells, looking horrified as she clutches the dog to her chest and levels him with a disturbing amount of judgement. “What the actual fuck? Do you _like_ getting robbed? You’re so stupid. I can’t believe you.”

Clint waits while she gets it out of her system, leaning his head back against the wall and grinning a little bit. As disappointed as he is to find Kate curled up in a goddamn alleyway, he’s really fucking pleased she’s not dead.

It’s almost worth getting three hundred dollars stolen from – well. Not his cookie jar. He may or may not have left the cash clip within pretty easy finding distance of the couch he let her crash on, a few months ago.

While Kate’s still yammering, and the dog is wriggling happily, Clint’s phone buzzes from inside his pocket.

He pulls it out to find a text from Rumlow, who’s programmed himself in under the name Ryan.

It’s a New Jersey address, a drop zone he’s visited once before under far less scrutinised circumstances.

He pockets the phone, looking up to find a pair of deeply suspicious, cocoa-dark eyes narrowed at him. Kate stares grumpily at him, her arms clutching the mangy mutt burrowed into her chest and her knees poking out of the holes in her jeans.

She’s got a fire and brimstone temper, the kind of dirt pride that lay thick over the canopies of the circus Clint grew up in. She’s familiar in all the worst possible ways.

Maybe that’s why he puts up with this shit.

“If I give you _this,”_ he says, digging the other fifty dollar note out of his jacket. “Will you use it to go back to my apartment and get some goddamn rest, kid? There’s probably a can of beans in the cupboard.”

Instead of replying, her fingers dig deeper into the dog’s scruff.

“You can bring the dog,” he clarifies. “Give him a bath, for God’s sake. I’m not using it at the moment anyhow.”

Back when he met Kate the first time, she had probably been fifteen years old. She’d fought his kindness so hard Clint’s pretty sure she’d have gotten the drop on him, had he been anything less than the trained agent and assassin he is. It’s not hard to understand. He doubts he’d have been any more trusting in her shoes.

He _hadn’t_ been, more to the point.

With a flash of pale fingers, muck under her nails and blood on her thumb, Kate snatches the bill he holds out.

“Fine,” she snarls, like she’s doing him all the favours in the world.

Clint smirks at her, can’t fault her priorities. She might not have been tempted strongly enough by the bed and the beans, but a bath for the dog is the tipping point. Even if she’s not there by the time Clint gets around to returning to his Bed-Stuy apartment, he knows at the very least, she will go there at some point.

They’ve played this game enough times already.

He refrains from thanking her, or praising her, mostly because he does not have the energy to hold up his end in a fight, not even against an underfed teenager. Instead, he offers her a short boy scout salute and takes his leave of the alley, knowing she won’t budge an inch until he’s long out of sight anyhow.

Clint pulls the phone out briefly, checks he hasn’t missed another message. It’s getting late, so he slips the phone back into his pocket and makes his way down towards the subway, hood pulled up over his head, bruises pulsing. He thinks about Natasha’s text, can hear her voice in every letter of it.

The city churns and rumbles, the sky violet and calm.

He might still beat her back.

*

**a rumour**

*

Strike Team DELTA has this reputation. They’ve been cultivating it since the beginning.

They are a balanced equation. She is up-close and personal. He sees better from a distance.

There is a rumour at SHIELD, or perhaps a warning: _If the Black Widow is in your reach, you are in Hawkeye’s scope._

This is an exaggeration, just as all good rumours are. Like the Black Widow’s alias, like the story behind Nick Fury’s eyepatch. Like the details of Phil Coulson’s success record.

So, the story goes, that Hawkeye hasn’t gone deep undercover since ’06. This is, in its own way, true.

Except for how it’s also completely false.

*


	3. PART ONE: Chapter II

*

**PART ONE**

** Chapter II **

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

It’s not yet ten by the time Clint enters Stark Tower.

He makes straight for one of the few all-access elevators, where he’s greeted by JARVIS with the same _“Good evening, Agent Barton”_ as before.

“Hey, JARVIS,” he replies, doesn’t even have to fake his yawn. “Can you take me to wherever Bruce is?”

 _“That would be the communal kitchen, Agent Barton,”_ JARVIS says as the elevator whirs upwards.

Clint keeps his sigh locked tight in his chest. He’d been counting on Bruce being in his lab, this time in the evening. Dinner over and done with. If Bruce is there this late, odds are he’s not alone.

Still, there’ nothing to be done about it.

Tony’s been wanting to show off – show _Clint,_ that is – his mock-ups for new arrows, having become an archery expert overnight along with everything else he fits in that brakeless brain of his. There’s very little Clint wants to do less than field Tony Stark’s blunt, incessant questions that usually carry a sly implication of how unlikely he finds it that Clint can calculate wind velocity in his head without a university degree.

The elevator arrives on the main communal floor, which Tony had somehow managed to restock less than thirty-six hours after he’d obligingly paid for the collective weight of all the Avengers in shawarma. There’s even been a promise of their own quarters once the tower is fully rebuilt, although Clint doesn’t really understand how this is going to be any different from the generic rooms they’ve been temporarily afforded by the compulsive-gift-giver that is Anthony Stark.

Clint makes his way to the kitchen, aware that JARVIS will probably have tattled on him upon arrival.

The pinching smell of chilli and cumin greets him first, and though his stomach churns unpleasantly, he takes a deep greedy breath of it as he takes in the cluttered sight before him. They’re all sitting around the dining island in the middle of the room, which is laden with mostly empty plates and half-eaten pans of something only Bruce will have cooked.

Bruce is fishing through the nearest pan and he waves a sauce filled spoon at Clint.

“Food?”

“You know you’re supposed to call if you’re going to miss dinner, Junior,” Tony says. “Mom and Dad get awful worried, what with that big price on your head and all.”

 _“Tony,”_ Steve interjects, blunt and loud and looking downright mutinous even with his fork suspended to his mouth, dripping sauce into his lap.

Clint laughs anyway, avoiding Natasha’s cool glare from her perch on the nearest corner, and starts helping himself to a fork of leftovers from her plate.

“I do not know who you think Mom and Dad are in all this, and I do not want to know, Stark.”

He feels more than sees Steve’s less than surreptitious glance. Clint’s not sure if it’s a team thing or a regular-human thing, but Steve always seems to be checking him for injuries every time he shows up.

Beside him, Natasha starts separating the food on her plate into what’s acceptable for Clint to steal and what isn’t. He spears a piece of lamb anyway. She doesn’t bother stopping him.

Tony seems less concerned about Clint’s welfare than the others, or at least has the good grace to hide it better with a side of acidic teasing. All those schmucks who believe Tony Stark’s tactless reputation? They couldn’t be more wrong.

The food is good, meat all but melted, sauce rich and thick, ripping at the cut inside Clint’s lip. It’s almost enough to make him hungry. Despite this, he only manages three mouthfuls before giving up. There’s no sense wasting Bruce’s hard work. Odds are it’ll be coming back up in an hour or two.

“So, Katniss, what’s brought you crawling back to my humble abode this time?” Tony continues, expertly oblivious to Steve’s continuing disapproval.

Even Bruce looks a little long-suffering.

“If you think I come here for anything more than the thread-count of the sheets, Stark, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.”

“Well that’s just insulting. The mattresses have got to be worth something, too.”

Clint pushes enough around the tabletop to rest both forearms, poorly stifling a yawn.

“I regularly sleep in safehouses without beds, Tony. Any mattress is worth something. Not just yours.”

When Natasha shifts her body subtly to the right, her bare arm brushes his elbow. It takes effort not to lean into the touch. He can feel the frost of her anger, the suspicion in her eyes. There’s nothing he can do about it, might as well bask in false ignorance while he can.

He blocks out Tony’s grumbled response long enough to look back over at Steve, whose worried expression hasn’t softened at all. Clint sends him something that hopefully resembles a reassuring smile. By the way Steve’s frown lines smooth out, it seems to have done to trick.

“Actually,” he says, rather than waiting for Tony to bring up the goddamn arrows. “I’ve got an appointment with my doctor.”

Bruce only slightly glowers at him, mopping the last of his curry with a rip of chapati and sighing.

“I’m telling you, Clint, the half-life is correct. You’ll be clean of radiation in two days.”

“Yeah, well. Can’t hurt to be sure,” Clint says with a shrug. “Come on, doc. Help a poor paranoid sniper out.”

He barely manages to rein in something much more acerbic, about what just might happen to his dear, radioactive body if left unchecked. Out of anybody, Bruce is probably the least deserving of Clint’s itchy mood – save perhaps Steve, though that’s only because Captain Earnestness is being his very best self at the moment, on account of the noose loosely tied around Clint’s neck as of eight days ago.

“Come on then,” Bruce says wearily, an exaggerated slump in his step. “Mr Stark, you’re on dish duty.”

“You mean JARVIS –”

“I mean you, Tony.” Bruce eyes him with unusual severity.

Turns out Clint already knows who Mom and Dad are after all. He grins, rests his hand on Nat’s arm for a bare second of contact that she doesn’t return and follows Bruce out of the kitchen, down towards his lab, three floors below.

“You feeling any different?” Bruce asks, generously waiting until they’re inside the closed doors of his private workshop before speaking.

As per Bruce’s unsurprising request, Tony’s kept most of JARVIS’ functions out of his portion of the labs. Clint doesn’t blame him. Years being hunted down by all kinds of alphabet agencies would be enough to make anybody against too much in the way of supervision, however utterly benign JARVIS is at his core.

“Worse,” he replies honestly. “Some time in the last six hours.”

He hops up onto the same table as last time, swinging his legs while Bruce readies a fresh needle and vial.

“You know it’s probably nothing to do with the radiation, Clint,” Bruce says very cautiously, eyes resolutely on the equipment. “Don’t you?”

There’s no stopping Clint’s instinctive, porcupine bristle.

He pinches the sides of his legs between his thumbs and forefingers, reminding himself of who exactly he’s talking to.

“I can tell the difference between what’s natural and unnatural, Bruce.”

“I believe you.”

It’s sincere, well-intended and completely unexpected. This is why Clint can’t take this to SHIELD Medical. Either they won’t believe him at all, or they’ll believe him too much and he’ll end up in lockdown, maybe his own hawk cage while they all spend another twelve hours of tests deciding if he’s still under Loki’s influence.

Bruce is entirely unique, for reasons beyond his problematic alter ego. Clint remains unconvinced the good doctor realises that.

His compassion is an infinite well, unflinching in the face of every conceivable horror, and perhaps that’s a learned trait, a diamond forged from the pressure of being treated so abominably by others. Truthfully, Clint rather thinks it’s a born quality of Bruce’s.

Clint hadn’t been present to witness the doctor’s manner and behaviour prior to his own co-ordinated attack on the Helicarrier, but Nat has filled him in since. He’s not sure anybody else would or even _could_ have remained quite so gracious in light of the indignities he was afforded even by the agency who had sought him out for aid.

He holds out his arm while Bruce draws a vial of blood, watching it pool dark red in the glass tube. Bruce is gentle about it, the way he is about everything when he has the choice. Once the vial is full, he slides the needle out, caps it and holds a cotton ball into the crook of Clint’s elbow for thirty seconds before letting Clint take over and taping it to his skin.

The deliberate care is disorienting, almost unwelcome, yet Clint can’t hold it against him.

While Bruce gets to work, Clint hops down, shrugging his hoodie back on and rolling up the sleeves as he looks around idly.

He’s always liked laboratories and workshops. Some of his best break-ins as a teenager had been to local schools a town over from wherever the circus had pitched their tents. Most of the schools with shoddy enough security to get away with breaking into hadn’t been particularly well equipped, but fourteen-year-old Clint Barton had been awestruck all the same.

He’d even once stolen a packed-up chemistry set small enough to smuggle with the rest of his gear when it was time to leave, though it had lasted less than a month.

Clint’s significantly better read now than he had been during his days at the circus, courtesy of both SHIELD and, before that, a penchant for strategically chosen one-night stands with college students, none of whom ever noticed their vanished ID cards for at least twenty-four hours afterwards.

Nonetheless, he still could only name half the instruments already stocked in Bruce’s workshop. There’s a large, boxlike microscope _thing_ on the other side of the worktop and he peers through the eyeglass, nearly bangs his face on it in the process.

“You know,” Bruce says in the same voice as before. “You don’t actually need excuses to come down here.”

It’s unclear, from the neutrality of his tone, whether he means the lab, or the tower as a whole. Maybe both.

Clint holds himself very still, and though Bruce’s face is turned down to his own, more regular looking microscope, he’s definitely monitoring Clint’s response.

It’s easy, being _this._ Clint’s been wearing different faces his whole life; he’s predisposed to few natural states, but slipping on the skin-jacket of an insecure, oft-displaced orphan is uncomfortably easy. _This_ Clint is transparent, wears his motives on his creased sleeves like a beating bleeding heart and he feels only slightly guilty about how quickly Bruce leaps on it.

Bruce, an insecure, oft-displaced orphan himself, looks at the flat mirror of Clint Barton and sees his own face reflected back, hollow eyes in the bland, guilty smile Clint offers him.

Clint crosses his arms over his chest, fingers tucked into his armpits, and he shrugs a childish, secretive shrug that makes Bruce snort soundlessly.

“Your bloodwork will take an hour at least.”

“Perfect.”

Clint pulls the phone out of his pocket, extracting the sim card with a crack of the casing and waving it loosely between his forefinger and thumb.

“Think you could be persuaded to do me one more favour?”

Bruce’s eyes narrow. He reaches slowly to take it, turning it over twice.

“What do you want me to do with it?”

He sounds less than eager.

“Just check it for any tracking additions. Can’t avoid standard GPS but I want to make sure.”

Bruce leans back against the worktop and points out truthfully, “Tony could do this in half the time.”

“And with twice the amount of questions,” Clint agrees. “Come on, Bruce. Tony would take out any tracking chips he finds, but only so he could put his own in instead.”

Bruce makes a reluctant sound of agreement at that.

“Did SHIELD give you this?” he asks, still dubious.

Luckily, Clint only needs one more transparently bland smile to respond. Bruce will assume _Yes,_ and technically he won’t be wrong. This, as far as Clint is concerned, is more than fair play. Fairer than he usually plays, at least.

Nat should be damn well proud of him.

“Yes, fine,” Bruce says without further deliberation, and that’s at least one good thing about Fury’s faux pas over Phase Two and his slow response to Clint’s soft execution date. Everybody in the tower is more than ready to stick it to SHIELD right now.

“Thanks, man,” Clint says with a grin.

“Don’t mention it,” Bruce says wryly, pausing half-turned to add. “Seriously, don’t. Tony won’t be pleased that you don’t trust him with your tech.”

“I’m letting him design my new arrows,” Clint points out. A fact which he considers one of his more magnanimous decisions so far this year.

Bruce seems to consider this a token effort at best, judging by the so-so shake of his hand in dismissal.

Clint hops back up onto the counter, close enough to watch Bruce work, possibly harass him with questions about the boxlike microscope thing. He presses at the cotton ball pinprick in his elbow where the needle went in. It’s a tiny, memorable ache. He’s always disappointed when it doesn’t bruise.

The hour passes, and then the bones of another. The blood is almost clean, just as Bruce predicted; the sim card less so.

There’s nothing to be done about the blood except wait another forty-one hours for the radiation to leave his system and while the sim card could be untampered with, Clint decides against it, much to Bruce’s visible alarm.

Clint waves off his concerns easily, promises him breakfast in recompense, and leaves him to his _Scanning Probe Microscope_ – apparently, _probe_ is no longer considered an amusing word, but what does Bruce know? He’s been living in Calcutta for the past year.

The time is creeping past midnight when Clint finally makes his way to the apartment Tony has temporarily given him and Natasha to share. The excessive eyebrow wiggling that had occurred when it was offered notwithstanding, it does in fact have two bedrooms. Two very generously furnished bedrooms, in fact.

Despite the fact it has two bedrooms, Clint is very unsurprised to find his own bed already occupied when he gets there.

The lights are off, but the windows are clear, letting in a flood of Manhattan night brightness. From the doorway, he can see Nat’s face, pale against the pillows. Her eyes are closed, though he knows she’s awake. She’s underneath the covers, hair damp, tucked behind her ears.

He knows, then, knows in his bone marrow, if he were to remain silent, to get changed without comment, slide into bed next to her and go straight to sleep, she would let him.

It’s reprehensible, maybe, how close he comes to doing just that.

The apartment is for the most part as neutral as new apartments get, a far cry from their safehouse in Bari, or the one in Munich. Its drawers, however, are already fully stocked, courtesy of both Tony Stark’s intrusive nature and Natasha Romanoff’s habit of overpreparing with the enthusiasm of a doomsday hoarder.

Clint pulls out a pair of comfortable grey sweatpants first, followed by one of the fully charged burner phones left in his sock drawer, inserting Rumlow’s sim card into it. He drops the dead phone he’d been using for the past week into the scrap box before getting changed quickly and crawling up the bed, which sinks like marshmallow around him.

Natasha hasn’t moved. He can feel her anticipation strung tight as a bow, though she looks perfectly peaceful.

For a moment, Clint wants nothing more than to drop his head into the pillow, close his eyes and sleep while he can, while she’s close and safe and quiet. The light from the window has been blocked by his frame, leaving her small in his shadow.

He can’t. It’s not fair.

Carefully, with calculated slowness, he leans down to press a chaste kiss to her forehead. By the time he pulls back, her eyes are open. Bright, glittering caves.

She pushes herself up onto one elbow, mirroring him, with her face as cool and unforgiving as marble.

“Tell me you aren’t working right now.”

It’s rare, that she asks things of him that he can’t deliver, hurts all the more for it. At least, it usually does.

Clint sighs hard through his nose, turning briefly away while he wriggles under the covers.

“Tell me, Clint,” Natasha says.

A hard voice, brittle. She’s never enjoyed being angry, however good at it she is.

“What do you want from me, Tasha?” he retorts, too harsh, too frustrated. “I can’t just _stop._ I may as well give up if I do that. I can’t just sit here, waiting for a death sentence. If Fury wants me in the field –”

He slumps onto his back, looking up at her, lamplit by New York at night, a three-part tragedy in her face. She puts her hand on his cheek, so lightly her palm tickles against the faint stubble on his jaw. When she frowns, her disappointment gleams in her eyes as she searches his own.

“Where are you?” she asks, so softly; it lands like a punch in his sternum.

Clint blinks, tearing his eyes away from the burn of hers. He swallows around the stones in his throat, wants to hide, hide from her eyes and her hands, the cut of her tongue.

“Right here,” he tries to say but he chokes on it, and the words break up in his mouth.

He has to clamp his mouth shut, bite down on the corners of his lips; when he shakes her hand off his face, she puts it on his clavicle instead.

“No, you’re not.”

Clint has, in his own way, loved her from the first. He’s always loved her, and he always will. Sometimes he’s surprised he has room for anything else, the space she takes up inside him.

Only, that’s not quite true, is it?

“You need to take a step back,” she tells him, whispers it into his ear like a lover. His stomach winds around the knots it’s tied itself in.

The three bites of curried lamb are in danger of coming back up.

He takes a steadying breath, puts his hand on hers where it rests, just north of his heart. When he looks around at her, their noses are touching. He almost laughs, hysterical, and thinks of kids’ sleepovers, whispering together long past bedtime. Not that either of them had sleepovers as children, but Clint at least had his brother. He remembers the winter nights, their freezing feet pressing against each other’s shins for warmth, clutching at shared blankets and hiding their faces under their pillows.

“What will that do, hmm?” he asks her. Aims for cold but it comes out lukewarm at best. “Will that bring them all back? Will that get the job done? Tell me, Natasha. Please. Tell me what _taking a step back_ will do for me.”

There’s more than a little sincerity in his request. A huge, ripped up piece of him wants to. He wants to take a step back, to walk away even now yet he can’t. He doesn’t know how. And what would happen if he managed?

“You need time to grieve, Clint,” she says, so desperately, so disgustingly reasonable it makes him want to lash out.

He doesn’t even manage to get her hand off his chest.

“I’ve lost people before,” he tells her. Unnecessary, when it’s clear she won’t be moved.

His gut churns with the truth of it, and the lie, too.

And Natasha, she says, silk and sand: “You didn’t love them.”

Indignant rage rises through him so fast, filling his veins with a hurting, harrowing disbelief. Clint flinches violently, has to pull back, to turn; he looks out to the window, his eyes stinging and his teeth grinding. He can feel Natasha’s forehead on the ball of his shoulder, her arm across his torso, her nails biting his skin.

 _That’s not fair,_ he wants to say to her, wants to shout it in her doe soft face, shout it until it becomes something closer to true.

“I have to do this,” he says, jaw locked up, and he barely manages to keep the tremor out of his voice.

Natasha breathes sharp, annoyed. She’s all nails and scorn like this, hard edges on his bruises, the way she learned every affection. Less rough than ruinous.

“You’re going to make a mistake. If you want to get yourself killed that’s one thing, but you’re not the only person at risk here,” she says, and misses her mark. A rarity, and he relishes it callously.

Clint smiles weakly at the window, feeling cold and hollow in spite of the heat of Natasha’s body next to his own.

 _Remember Budapest,_ he wants to say, wants to whisper like the punchline of a bad joke. _Remember what we promised each other?_

Perhaps she senses it, because she strikes again, harder and harsher this time.

“Phil would bench you himself if he could.”

Clint closes his eyes, turning his back to Natasha completely but taking her reaching arm with him, forcing her to curl around his back.

“You’re a terrible little spoon,” she reminds him with hostility. Doesn’t seem to realise eighty percent of the reward is getting the Black Widow to say _little spoon_ at all.

“Well you’re a very good big spoon,” he tells her kindly, wriggling back into her frame even as she digs her big toe into his calf.

Impractical as it is, he feels undeniably as close to alright as he’s felt in days, in weeks, or maybe it’s months by now.

Pressing a dry kiss to a knuckle of his spine, Natasha tells him to sleep, and though it feels like he never will again, between the clutch of her arms, her breaths against his lungs in steady guidance he does eventually fall into a broken, shallow sleep.

*

By the time Clint wakes up for the eighth time, at half past six in the morning, Rumlow has texted him again.

The number is saved on the card under the name _Ryan H._ There are three other numbers saved, the names _Luca F., Charlotte B., and X2C7._ Clint doesn’t recognise any of them, only that they’re cell numbers and most likely all burners.

Natasha gets up when he does. As usual, it’s impossible to tell if she’d been woken by his movements or had stayed awake all night. She simply rolls gracefully off the mattress, all legs and crumpled red hair, and shuts the en-suite bathroom door behind her.

It’s much easier to tell whether or not she’s still cross with him.

Clint is ready to come to terms with the distinct possibility she is going to be cross for a while.

He isn’t worried. They haven’t found a failure of Clint’s that Nat hasn’t been able to forgive yet, and he’s shot her twice, once on purpose and the other time. Well. She should know better than to _move._

Rather than ruminate on it any further, he opens Rumlow’s text, which includes an address for the warehouse strip where they stashed the wrecked trucks two years ago, along with the time for the meet. He’s got hours yet, and seeing as he had promised Bruce breakfast, he has a quick shower of his own in Natasha’s suite, making sure to use twice as much of her lavender scented bodywash as he needs, before throwing on some new sweats and making for the kitchen.

The kitchen, which has already seen signs of life by the time he gets there.

The coffee pot’s been used and washed, is mostly dried on the rack along with a mug and spoon. Clint grins. Only one person he knows is that diligent at this time in the morning –

He catches himself before he can really remember; contorts the thought in his head into something else, something solid, something equally true. Because it is; because he does still know only one person who’s that diligent in the morning. Only, it’s not Phil Coulson anymore, it’s Steve Rogers.

It takes effort, but the grin stays on his face, lasts tight as a mask of clay through the autopilot process of brewing more coffee and setting about cooking up a lazy meal of bacon, eggs and toast. He hadn’t promised _fancy,_ just breakfast.

Loopholes are important.

By the time he hears movement behind him of somebody joining him, the bacon is crisping, he’s on his second cup of caffeinated ambrosia and his hair is dry.

“Smells good,” Steve says with pointed interest and Clint makes sure to wait until the good Captain can see his eye roll.

“Help with the toast and you’ve got a deal, Rogers,” he says.

Steve steps to it promptly, wearing a half-smile Clint’s seen before. Not that Clint’s seen Steve do anything more than half-smile. Yet.

Clint can’t blame him. Melancholy clings to Steve Rogers the way patriotism clings to his Captain’s uniform. He carries it with grace, an enduring resilience that speaks volumes of a golden generation, but it itches under Clint’s skin to sense it nonetheless.

Steve’s standing close enough that Clint can smell his shampoo and the cottony vanilla of his clothes.

Clint has read Steve Rogers’ file – bulkier, infinitely more insightful than the _Captain America_ one that Tony so smugly hacked into a week ago. He’s pretty sure the good Steven G. Rogers is a wilier devil than SHIELD’s been giving him credit for, because Clint has come up with an entire list of broad-spectrum diagnoses that the man’s medical file hadn’t even brushed upon, none more obvious than being downright touch starved.

No wonder, too. The guy was thrown from the close quarters of sharing a square foot of space with an entire collection of Howling Commandos to the isolated freeze of being an ice cube for nearly seventy years.

It’s unmistakeable, the non-distance Steve puts between himself and his teammates without realising it on a regular basis, as if they were still huddled in outposts and trenches together.

Clint’s trying his best to allow it. He’s never emanated _back off_ vibes quite as expertly as Natasha, but he’s cultivated a strong reputation at SHIELD that has afforded him the leisure of never being reached for, or brushed up against, not even in the busiest of areas.

He knows that, with Thor out in the far lands of Asgard, he’s probably the only person not shying away from Steve’s blatantly accidental personal space invasions.

Bruce is too practiced at not letting others in unsafe proximity when he can help it, and Tony’s spent so many years getting his entire life invaded he probably hasn’t let anyone other than Ms Potts and Colonel Rhodes in his personal space in years. And Nat, well. Nat might allow it, eventually.

But not yet.

So, Clint doesn’t flinch away from Steve’s elbow brushes, the heat radiating from him, lit furnace blond. In fact, a reluctant, piecemeal part of Clint actually kind of enjoys the gentility of it. There’s a respectful harmlessness to Steve’s unconscious actions that goes a long way to reminding Clint that, whatever else he is, national icon, war hero, super soldier, Steve Rogers is still a skittish, traumatised twenty-six-year-old.

In any case, it’s not _too_ awkward, buddying up with Captain America to make breakfast. Whenever they’d played at comic books and war games as kids, Barney had always insisted on being Captain America, relegating his little brother to being sidekick-Bucky-Barnes, so there’s not too much _I used to dress up as you_ going on in Clint’s destructive hindbrain.

Not that Clint intends to ever reveal this titbit to Steve.

“Have you heard anything more from Fury?” Steve asks as he scrapes thin, wartime ration licks of butter onto the toast while Clint flips bacon between two large pans. He’s trying to sound casual; manages it about as well as Tony manages modesty.

“Nope,” Clint replies, cracking another egg straight into a pan and flicking the spitting oil off his hands with a hiss. “There’s nothing he can really do – ‘cept keep me on stand down and parrot stuff at the World Security Council until they back down. It’ll come down to the Secretary, probably. Alexander Pierce. He’s got the deciding vote on my innocence.”

By God above, does the weight of Captain America’s stare land heavy.

Clint’s face heats up with the force of Steve’s inquisitiveness. He takes a gulp of coffee to avoid staring back.

“What do you think Pierce will do?”

Clint shrugs with a look of indifference he almost genuinely feels.

“Pierce is an asshole, and he gives more than a damn about SHIELD. He’s after my head. But he’s good friends with the Director. If Fury makes the case for me, he’ll probably fold. Then it’s only a matter of time before the rest of them back off.”

Clint’s met Secretary Pierce twice in his life. Both times, he came away with the distinct impression he meant as much to Pierce as the paper cup holding his coffee. It’s kind of shitty, that the guy hadn’t batted an eyelid at the mention of all the ways Clint had saved SHIELD’s ass on the field and yet, he gets brainwashed by one stupid Norse God and suddenly he’s Public Enemy Number One, front and centre, the first three slots on Pierce’s shitlist.

Clint doesn’t mention the crucial part currently hindering Fury’s progress in making a decent case in The Universe vs. Barton. That’s not for Steve, or anyone, to know.

“If there’s anything I can do…” Steve says, for what’s got to be the tenth time already.

So goddamn earnest, it makes Clint’s teeth hurt.

“I’ll be sure to tell you, Cap.”

Clint flashes him another grin and is saved from having to brave the puppyish look in Steve’s eyes by the arrival of Bruce and Natasha, who walk in simultaneously, not speaking and looking suspiciously innocent.

He wonders if Bruce has been oversharing his blood tests. An unfortunate side effect of not seeing a ‘real doctor’. Bruce Banner has made it more than clear already how free he considers himself of the rules of patient confidentiality. Then again, it’s not like Natasha wouldn’t find out somehow anyway.

She gives Clint little more than a cursory glance as she enters – still cross, although maybe about the lavender bodywash this time – before sitting down expectantly at the island worktop. Bruce, at the very least, has the decent manners to get some cutlery out for everybody.

Clint starts plating up the bacon and eggs, which must amount to half a pig and a henhouse in total, resolutely ignoring the concerted effort Natasha makes to be a total asshole while telling Steve about an exhibition he might enjoy. She knows full well Clint would actually enjoy a retrospective on Stanley Kubrick’s early photography career. She has no right inviting Steve on a day trip without him.

Bruce is being his reliably patient, watchful self, and Clint offers him a one lip smile as he pours the coffee and blocks out Nat’s wildly incorrect explanations of Stanley Kubrick’s legacy to an intrigued Steve.

It’s fine. Let her take Steve to the exhibition. She’ll be bored shitless and it’ll serve her right.

In his pocket, Clint’s phone buzzes again. He daren’t risk checking it while Natasha’s in the room, so he takes a seat beside Bruce and starts stabbing a little too enthusiastically at his eggs to make it look like he’s eating, earning him a few discerning looks.

“Want to come with us, Hawkeye?” Steve asks, soft all over when he’s being kind.

Clint doesn’t need to look to know Natasha is watching him. He keeps his eyes on Steve, on his gentle expression, like he doesn’t know how dangerous it is to be vulnerable, even around his teammates. Especially around his teammates.

Or perhaps he simply hasn’t a clue he’s so transparent.

“Can’t, I’m afraid,” Clint replies, lets his genuine regret slip over him in a rueful shrug. “Errands to run. A Director to appease. You know, the usual.”

Steve’s crinkle-brow worry is potent enough that Clint closes up a little, tries to hide any lingering interest he might have because there’s regret and then there’s actual disappointment and he has the feeling Steve would not let it go with Nat’s chilly passivity if he thought Clint actually _wanted_ to come along.

“Ok,” Clint says with a blustered sigh. “Maybe. _Maybe.”_

Steve grins wide, and nobody but Clint seems to notice the way Natasha’s head tilts very obviously towards her shoulder in a mocking, catlike pose. Bruce takes good-intentioned mercy and interjects with a question about other New York sights on Steve’s list, pulling his attention back across the table.

Clint forces himself to remain grateful long enough to wolf down five bites of his food before clattering his plate in the sink with a parting _“Nat’s on clean up!”,_ then he’s out of the door.

He has JARVIS lock down his room, and maybe he feels guilty but mostly he feels relieved. It’s not like Natasha couldn’t find her way in if she really wanted.

There is a whispering in his soul, words etched into him, that may never be scrubbed away.

*

**a beginning**

*

When he was twenty-two years old, Clint shot a man with his own gun.

It was a standard issue, and the man had alphabet agency scribbled all over him clear as tattoos in his unlabelled suit and his calloused hands and his scentless deodorant. Less clear was whether he’d been sent to kill Clint or to recruit him. Maybe it was neither.

Whatever his intentions were, he did not make them clear quickly enough, which was his first mistake.

His second, was underestimating his target.

Clint shot him clean in the forehead from close range, and he dropped backwards into the kitchen table before crumpling to the floor. His brains were splattered all over the pasta Clint had been happily eating in peace, minding his own goddamn business before the intrusion.

He gave the corpse a frown, because quite frankly, it was the height of rudeness to interrupt a guy when he was eating. Any assassin worth his salt would know and respect those boundaries, as far as Clint was concerned.

The man’s only saving grace was that at least he hadn’t spoiled a perfectly good pizza, only some subpar pasta.

With his safehouse burned and his dinner ruined, Clint packed his things, wiped everything down, grabbed his bow and ducked out the fire escape, leaving a note pinned to the guy’s tie that read:

_Please return to CIA/SIS/DGSE/BND/SVR/INTERPOL/OTHER as required._

_Sorry._

_Maybe send a card first next time?_

*

Seven months later, he was taking a well-earned break in Munich to regrow three fingernails and reacquaint himself with his REM cycle when he received a postcard addressed to a _Mr CFB._

It was a touristy photo of the Swedish Royal family, waving serenely from a balcony. In the space next to the hastily scribbled address of the safehouse he was absolutely certain he had told nobody about, because he had quite literally only just acquired it as of four days prior, there was a message that was impossible to misinterpret.

_We need to talk._

There was no signature, but there didn’t need to be. Clint smirked, pinned the postcard to his fridge, and added an extra couple of chicken thighs to the pan in the oven.

At least this time, he thought to himself, he’d get to finish his dinner, even if it did still end in a shooting.

*

A further eleven months later, Specialist Clint Barton walked into the SHIELD HQ in Washington D.C., a newly qualified Level 2 asset.

*

**an ending**

*

 _You have heart,_ Loki said, before claiming it for his purpose.

Only, later, as Clint cleaned the blood from his arrows, his world a foggy shade of ice.

_But who does it belong to?_

He doesn’t remember saying, doesn’t think he ever told. It seems likely he will never know exactly how Loki found out.

All Clint knows is this: by the time he woke up from the freeze of obedience, Phil Coulson was dead and gone.

*


	4. PART ONE: Chapter III

*

** PART ONE **

** Chapter III **

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

Of all the dumb shit Clint Barton has ever done in his life, he really would have thought _Moving illegally obtained weaponry across state lines in broad daylight_ would take the cake.

Unfortunately – or perhaps incredibly, depending on one’s perspective – he has found a way to exceed his self-expectations once again. Because surely, turning up _late_ to move illegally obtained weaponry across state lines in broad daylight is even dumber than moving it in the first place.

In his defence, the Kubrick exhibition had been _brilliant,_ and he had managed to upstage Natasha not just once but multiple times on his pop culture knowledge while explaining certain exhibits’ relevance to an enthralled Steve.

Natasha likes to fall back on the old _I was raised in a Russian torture chamber_ to get out of knowing a lot of things, but this has rarely flied with Clint, who is pretty sure he’d been legally allowed to buy alcohol in all the States of America before he could name them. Not that his own childhood has ever been an excuse Natasha is willing to accept, either.

He'd left Natasha and Steve just as they were discussing lunch, at which point Natasha violently broke the rules of engagement by suggesting a _pizza joint,_ just in time for Clint to head off. He’d stood strong against Steve’s puppy blues, ignored Natasha’s stony grin, and pelted back to the garage where he left his bike for just such an occasion.

He’s hungry already, and he’s more than a little mad at himself for not using his precious spare hours to go back to his apartment and see if Kate had done as she was told.

She’s more than capable of taking care of herself, and while Clint has tried his best to be a force of good where she’s concerned, he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. He knows if he _really_ wanted to do good by her, he’d have called social services the second he found her years ago. He just – he _couldn’t._ The way she’d looked at him, her mouth angry and her eyes afraid.

It’s a mystery to Clint, the incongruity of his own decision-making skills, sometimes.

And now, he’s _late._

By the time he pulls up to the warehouse, the first vehicle is packed and ready to clear, and the second one is halfway there. He’s so busy scrambling to get off his motorbike without falling on his face that he doesn’t even notice the two assault rifles pointing at him until he’s ten steps closer and tugging his helmet off.

Clint grins at both men, who are looking more than a little freaked, waving his hands in sly surrender as he drops to his knees and clutches his helmet to his chest like an infant.

“Hooh, boys, don’t shoot! Have mercy! I got kids to think of! Spare a life!”

“Fuck me, Barton,” Haarman snaps, lowering his rifle even as his face goes from stern to downright mutinous. “I ought to shoot you on principle, you stupid son of a bitch.”

Clint dumps his helmet and gloves in a pile on the ground, rolling his eyes and waltzing around Haarman to haul a flight case up into the second van’s open back doors.

The trick is just to pretend he’s been there the whole time, and maybe, _maybe,_ Rumlow won’t notice.

“Waste of bullets, man,” Nielson, the second guard, reassures Haarman. “He’s a dead man walking.”

“That’s me,” Clint replies with a toothy grin and a twitch of his brows.

If anything, this puts Haarman in a worse mood than before. He goes back to scanning the access road Clint had arrived from, clutching his gun like his third child and glaring at the wind.

The warehouse, like all those left along this stretch, is derelict; too expensive to fix up or be demolished. Relics, a lick away from the Hudson, miles of cracked concrete and ghosts of honest work gone awry. They’ve been stashing gear in this tin death trap for as long as Clint has known them, but never so much in one go.

Peering through into the main square of space, the smell of pigeons and rust filling the rafters, he sees three more men locking up the last of the cases. There’s a third van still empty, backed up to the loading entrance of the warehouse, and Clint recognises Rickard sitting in the driver’s seat, unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth as he frowns at a book that Clint would put money on being a Jack Reacher novel. The guy’s always been a walking contradiction.

By the time Clint stashes the box into the van, Nielson’s dropped his rifle completely and together they haul a case that may or may not contain a baby grand piano up into the second vehicle. The circular eagle emblem embossed on the lid is, in Clint’s humble opinion, really just asking for trouble.

The locks on the stash are all reinforced, and Clint can feel an itch remnant of his teenage years to try unpicking it, mostly just to see if he can.

“Thought you were in lock-up,” Haarman says through his frown as Clint jumps down and picks up another case.

“Thought you were getting married,” he retorts.

Nielson laughs. Haarman does not.

Luckily, or not as the case may be, they are interrupted by a loud, gravel dust voice.

“Barton! Don’t think you can sneak on in last minute without me noticing. Where the fuck have you been?”

Clint hoists the case up for Nielson, whose gleeful little smirk is just begging to meet Clint’s knuckles, and turns on his heel with a look of thunder.

“I had shit to do,” he drawls.

“Shit to do?” Rumlow scoffs disbelievingly as he strides towards him, brows creased in some reverse smirk. “What shit to do? You’re on stand down. You’ve never had _less_ to do.”

For all his scowling, Rumlow still slaps Clint’s shoulder when he reaches him, squeezing as he gives Clint a suspicious glancing onceover, somewhere between checking for injuries and eyeing his weapons.

“I got a life, you know,” Clint mutters, sarcastic enough that Rumlow only sort of laughs at the suggestion.

“There’s five more inside,” Rumlow says. “Stash your stuff in the basement. You’re in the first van with Haarman.”

Clint freezes, staring wide eyed and scandalised at the sheer cheek of it. This is absolutely not what he signed up for.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Haarman? For _four_ hours?”

Rumlow sniffs pointedly in the air, looking bored.

“More like eight, including the ride back.”

Clint shakes his head so violently he feels it all down his spine. He reaches to grab one handle of a case while Rumlow takes the other. It’s not much larger than a rifle case, but it’s goddamn heavy. What the hell have they grabbed?

Clint glowers a little at the eagle on top of it.

“Nu-uh,” he says, undeniably breathless as they trudge back outside, sweat speckling on their foreheads as the sun races them to towards its peak. “I’ll walk back, thanks.”

Rumlow smirks, but says no more on the subject.

It’s pretty quick work, in the end.

They’re all ending up in the same place, so Clint doesn’t worry too much about missing out on getting a look inside the first transport. They’ll have to unload at double speed once they reach Parsippany, so it’ll be all hands on deck and Clint’s carefully constructed reputation as a nosy motherfucker precedes him by a long mile.

Not to mention, Rumlow probably won’t trust any of the others to have eyes on the prize.

They’re packed up before their watches scrape through two o’clock. After the third time Clint yawns with a wide uncovered mouth, Haarman’s grip on the rifle gets a little tighter and Clint decides then and there he’s going to have at least one nap while Haarman’s driving.

Or, well. He’ll _pretend_ to have a nap. He’ll have the best goddamn fake nap that was ever fake napped. He probably couldn’t actually fall asleep next to Haarman even if he stuffed himself full of elephant tranquilisers first.

He leaves his bike in the basement as instructed, which is cluttered with an assortment of gear. They’re getting downright lazy. Eventually, someone’s going to forget something important down here and then they’ll all be in trouble.

That’s a worry for a future Clint, though, so for now he settles for pilfering a spare handgun and a floppy disk, mostly because who in God’s name still has anything on a floppy disk? Can people still even use floppy disks?

He’ll have to ask when he gets back.

His back aches and his eyes scrunch tight against the sting of the sunshine. He’s been avoiding broad daylight as best he can while the radiation sickness leaves his vision less than perfect.

By the time he swings into the passenger side of the first vehicle, suited up in stiff Kevlar with his comms on and a pair of sunglasses hiding his eyes, he’d almost forgotten who he was going to be sitting next to, and promptly groans at the look on Haarman’s face.

Clint’s more than used to being disliked. He has cultivated his entire personality around being able to choose who likes him and who can’t stand the be within fifty feet of him, and for the most part he has been able to wield this trait with lethal accuracy. Haarman, however, lives by a law unto himself, and for all Clint had tried in the early days to get in the guy’s good books, Haarman had refused to budge.

_“Echo Ena, is there a problem?”_

Rumlow’s voice is all lockjaw through the comms, and Clint fights back a smile when Haarman winces.

“No problem, boss,” Haarman replies. “Echo Ena ready to depart.”

They list off, one by one, and Clint leans his head back against the seat as Haarman pulls off the handbrake and takes the west exit out of the warehouse park.

Clint’s only been to the Parsippany base once before. Well, it’s not a base so much as a heavily guarded storage unit.

Last time, though, it had just been three of them. They’d been wearing civilian clothes that poorly concealed their guns and there had been a man trussed up in the trunk who used to work in the R&D of Stark Industries, who had been one of the worst interrogatees of all time. Lots of crying, very little to say that wasn’t _please_ and _why._

Clint keeps his eyes on the horizon, letting the rhythm of the wheels on the road lull away any encroaching memories, and plays the quiet game against Haarman, which he will undoubtedly win, because Haarman doesn’t know they’re playing. It’s the little things, after all, that make life that bit more bearable.

Inevitably, Haarman does speak, and when he does it’s with a hard line in his voice. They’re taking the most direct route, which means whatever the fuck is in the back of this van is either the least important, or the most dangerous, and by the tight grip Haarman has on the steering wheel, Clint is inclined to believe it’s the latter.

“So, Barton, how’s the high life treating you?”

He’s always been a bitter s-o-b.

“Oh, just grand,” Clint says, clicking his knuckles individually with relish and crossing his ankles as he stretches. “Five-star service round the clock. Did you know they make sheets with a fifteen hundred thread count? I mean, wow.”

Haarman knows better than to rise to simple goading, but Clint will take his wins where he can, and the prominent vein in Haarman’s temple is definitely a win.

That is, until Haarman adds in a vicious bite of anger,

“You should be shot, you know. For what you did.”

Clint keeps the smirk on his face, but it’s only muscle memory and years of practice. It’s nothing he hasn’t heard tenfold every day, but that’s _out there._ He’s guarded for it out there, he’s ready to catch the bullets and toss them back. He doesn’t expect it from these guys. Why would he? As far as they’re concerned, he’s done the world a favour.

Haarman’s throat tightens as he swallows, his pale brown eyes darting to Clint’s hands and back again. His own knuckles white, and the van speeds up just a little.

Clint takes off his sunglasses. The photosensitivity hasn’t gone down much, and almost instantly the throb of his headache comes back with a vengeance. He looks over at Haarman, waiting for the man to look him in the eye, but he waits a long time to no avail, so eventually, he speaks.

“Who did I kill?”

Haarman’s never liked him, that much is true. He’s never wanted him dead, though, not _really._ Not any more than the guy wants anybody dead when they annoy him too much.

It’s the only explanation.

“Who did I kill?” Clint asks a second time, more firmly than before. Even through the tinted windows, the sunlight is intense and painful.

Haarman rolls his neck back, seems to be shaking the tension out of his shoulders only it just moves further down his arms.

“Calding. Thornton.”

Right. Well.

Clint takes a silent, sullying breath, then puts his sunglasses back on.

“Hmm,” he says dismissively, pebbles in his stomach. “You win some, you lose some.”

Haarman flinches, and Clint does not feel it, not even the cut of his gaze when it reaches him.

It shuts him up, at least.

*

It’s a long four hours.

*

They reach Parsippany in good time, almost half an hour before the others. It’s not exactly _in_ the town, but it’s close enough. A large underground complex that’s little more than a scrapyard on ground level, as uninviting as it should be, though Clint doesn’t bother pointing out that when he was a kid, this was exactly the kind of place he enjoyed breaking into most.

Haarman pulls into the lot, and Clint swings out with his holster unclipped and his eyes in twelve places at once as he approaches the waiting guard, who’s doing an awful good job of pretending to be nothing but bored, except for the sheen of sweat on his brow.

“We’re closed,” he says, eyes on the van more than Clint.

Why does Clint always have the deal with the poorly trained ones?

“Are you?” Clint asks, sauntering closer and waving Haarman through.

He pulls a pin from his pocket, ignoring the way the guard scrambles back a step, and tosses it at the guy, who catches it instinctively, turning it over in his hands. He raises his eyebrows, taking in Clint’s face with the kind of interest that, any other time, he would assume meant he was halfway to at least dinner and a blowjob.

One more step, and he’s close enough to hear the rasp of the guy’s breath.

“Hail HYDRA,” he says in a low voice, and the guard nods.

“Hail HYDRA,” he replies, and waves his own hand at Haarman, who drives on with just enough speed to project how pissed he is.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” Clint says with a blank expression, and it falls flat enough for the guy to wince as he tosses back the pin and steps aside to let Clint through.

He walks on after Haarman, knowing better than to expect him to wait.

The air is crisp, the wind loud between the scraps of mangled metal piled like sentries all the way to the entrance. They burned the SI man’s corpse not twenty metres from here, last time. Almost two years ago, now.

By the time he gets to the van, Haarman’s opened the doors and is directing two waiting grunts to start unloading.

Clint moves to help, but Haarman grabs him, swings him around to stand by, all heavy boots and insecurity. His bead bright eyes track Clint’s every move with the suspicion of his own surliness and Clint just cocks his hip, looking bored as the two men trudge around to the back of the van and start unloading wordlessly.

The second vehicle of their convoy is twenty minutes out, assuming they haven’t deviated, and Clint keeps his impatient attention torn between listening for sounds of their arrival and watching the crates as they are ferried into the bunker on pulleys.

Twice, Haarman instructs the men on the proper handling of the materials as they are carried inside. Twice, the two men look furtively at Clint for confirmation. He nods both times, resolutely blind to Haarman’s incensed expression at the men’s assumption that Clint holds some sort of seniority over him.

It’s unclear whether this is because the men recognise Clint, or if he is just naturally projecting the sort of authority Haarman has been trying for years to cultivate. Clint’s never bothered to explain to Haarman that the key is often to talk as little as possible. That only the pettiest forms of power are loud.

(All these years distancing him from his days at the circus, he still remembers the Swordsman’s silences better than a single word the chatterbox Ringmaster ever said.)

The sun peeks shyly through the clouds in bursts of light, and Clint shivers a little, hiding behind his sunglasses though they do little for the sensitive ache of his eyes and brow.

The men work diligently, and it’s no time at all before they are dragging the last case out, just in time for a second vehicle to roll to a stop up ahead. Clint walks towards Nielson’s side immediately, leaving the keys with a guard to drive their now empty truck around to the exit road.

Rickard still has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, although it’s lit this time as he hops out of the driver’s seat.

By the looks of things, they’ve had a significantly more relaxing journey than Clint has, and he idly wonders at his chances of swapping with Nielson for the way back.

Haarman checks his phone for the third time in the past two minutes, and Clint pretends not to notice. Pretends, as well, not to know that by now Steve and Natasha will either be sparring in the gym or hiding at the back of the old movie theatre two doors down from the best pizza joint in Red Hook, depending on how well Clint sold the idea to them on his behalf.

He also pretends not to care about the rough dismissal Tasha had given him as he left earlier. Later, he’ll probably pretend not to care that his bed is lacking in grumpy redheads when he gets in.

As he stands in the dry glittery warmth pretending all manner of things, Rickard sidles up to him.

“Hey, Killer,” Rickard drawls, a ticklish voice, excitable.

It’s not a new name. Rickard’s been calling Clint that since their first job together, but it’s got new weight now. By the look on Rickard’s face, he likes the double-whammy. Clint raises an eyebrow in question, smirking.

“Can I help you?” he asks Rickard’s dopey face.

“You missed the high stakes on Sunday. Kingfisher cleaned up without you.”

“Good for Kingfisher,” Clint retorts with pointed disinterest. “I’ve been a little busy for Blackjack.”

“So I heard,” Rickard says with a hum of intrigue. It’s just Clint’s luck that the nosiest motherfuckers in all of SHIELD are also the ones playing for both sides. Or, well. Maybe that goes without saying. “I got a pal, says you’ve been getting cosy in Stark’s big compensation tower. He thinking of privatising heroes now? I think Danger Mouse’ll have something to say about that.”

Clint gives a loose, one-shouldered shrug, watching as a particularly large crate is hauled out of the second truck. Another, thinner case is placed on top of it, and he feels a tugging jolt in his stomach, like a surge of nausea.

“He buys the good coffee,” he says, shrugging again to loosen the hook twisting his insides, still staring at that innocuous case. “And what do you mean, thinking of? He’s already done it. Or did you miss his _privatised peace_ schtick at his inquiry last year? Privileged peace, more like. What a fuckin’ asshole.”

Rickard snickers, folding his arms over his chest and failing at not staring at Clint’s face.

He’s almost too young, is Rickard. He’s got a younger man’s eagerness about him that makes Clint wonder where Rumlow found him, or was it Rollins? One of them, anyhow. All the low-level grunts get roped in by the Alpha boys, these days. It’s been a consistent thing, these past few years.

“Is he as much of a dick in his downtime as he is for the cameras?” Rickard asks, one tilted eyebrow and a smug quirk to his mouth.

Clint watches the distracting crate and case disappear through the open double doors with wary eyes.

He thinks, unwillingly, of Tony Stark. The flashing worry of his dark brown eyes as he follows his teammates’ movements. The secret of his troubles buried, like his AI in the walls.

The cautious distance he keeps, the way he leans in, sometimes, like he _wants_ something he can’t ask for. The beautifully furnished rooms and the mock-ups piled in his lab for lighter explosive arrowheads that he’s been trying to get Clint to look at for days with so little subtlety, it’s a sorry kind of painful to listen to.

 _Mom and dad get awful worried,_ he said last night, like it wasn’t teeming with sincerity.

“You know showboaters, Rick,” Clint snorts dismissively. “Always switched on, whether the cameras are there or not. I’m sure he learned it all from his daddy dearest, right up there with sinking scotch and sucking off bigwigs.”

This time when Rickard laughs it’s a little harder, a shade of nasty that doesn’t suit his bright eyes.

Clint smirks at him instinctively, and swallows down everything else crawling up his throat.

“Hey, Rick,” he adds, while amusement is still ringing in Rickard’s mouth. “What we doing with this shit, anyhow?”

Rickard glances around, but Haarman’s on the other side of the compound, distracted by his phone, and the slow moving crates.

“Special deliveries. Most of this is going overseas to Europe. Remember Ilias? Business is slow. He’s got half as many girls as he’s got room for. We’re shipping this over the Atlantic and his boys are picking it up for us. According to Nielson, Strucker’s put in a big order.”

Clint barely manages to keep from turning back to look at Rickard, just to check the truth in his face. He stares instead at the double doors of the bunker, watching the looming dark within, the pull of it still tugging in his guts. There’s something in there, something bad, and he thinks he maybe knows what it is.

This feeling, this grip of something more powerful than his will. It’s familiar.

“Strucker?” he asks with a slant of goading disbelief. “He’s playing roulette with the ambassador in Paris.”

True to form, reliable as the pride of youth, Rickard puffs up a little.

“Yeah,” he says. “And he’s looking for stock. We’re sending him some.”

Rickard nods at the cases. Before Clint can say another word, though, there is the distinctive rumble of the third vehicle rolling up the dirt track, followed by the heavy slam of the door. Rumlow cracks his jaw loudly as he walks up, heavy swagger, all Kevlar and predatory grace.

“Alright boys, let’s pick up the pace. Haarman, stop sexting your mom and do some goddamn work.”

Clint and Rickard snap to it, sharing a grin when Haarman flushes, stuffing his phone into his pocket with a sullen look.

Rumlow leads the way to the back of his vehicle, swings open the doors and gestures for them to start as he pulls Nielson off to one side.

Clint gives Haarman a big, toothy grin as he hoists a case out, carrying it away with his nose in the air and Rickard’s laughter following him all the way to the open doors.

Inside is lit by sparse, harsh white lights, leaving heavy shadows sloping up the walls. It’s cold, the temperature and the light, and Clint shivers involuntarily as he follows a natural path through huge lines of shelving to a pile of freshly unloaded crates.

One of the junkyard guards is there, and he gestures to the end of the corridor of shelves when Clint stops.

Clint goes where he’s directed, quickly counting up the crates, measuring against their familiarity. He knows the moment he passes it. His stomach jolts, and an icy wave hits him so hard he nearly drops the crate.

He walks slowly, slow enough that as he puts it down, he has time to give a pathetic tug of the lock, just to check. It’s a keycode and a card scan. There’s no way he can crack it in the few minutes of spare time he’ll have before they’re done up there.

When he looks up, the guard has turned away, is looking back up at the entrance.

Futile as the gesture is, Clint digs his fingers under the crate and tips it halfway, grabbing the top to keep it from falling.

His mouth, dry, full of sand as he runs his hand over the bottom, feeling for an invisible seal in the top right –

There.

P.E.G.A.S.U.S. it says, his thumb runs over the marks and he knows if he looked at it in the light, it would be impossible to see.

Clint drops the case again, hurrying back the way he came just in time to pass Rickard, who’s heaving under the weight of a locked flight case.

“Let me,” Clint says, taking one end, and together they haul it, grim-faced, through the shelving.

Rickard says something, but Clint doesn’t hear it. His blood is rushing in his ears.

“What?”

“You too busy for Blackjack tonight, too?” Rickard asks, and Clint blinks, trying to remember what Blackjack even is.

“Maybe,” he says. “I got this. You go make sure Princess Haarman doesn’t break a nail.”

Rickard makes another harsh laugh-sound and does as he’s told.

The guard watches Clint with a furrowed brow. In the half-dark, it’s difficult to tell if he’s suspicious or afraid. One could work well in Clint’s favour, but the other, the other would not be good. The last thing he needs is a jumpy guard keeping an eye on him.

“Gonna help, or what?” Clint snaps, to which the guard sneers as he turns away, his mouth mostly hidden by a thick dark beard.

It’s close quarters in here, and there’s not much room to do more than fumble around, but Clint gets a hand into his pocket, pulling out three ultra-thin strips that he’d come so close to not bothering with. Maybe wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for the way Natasha’s nails dug into his forearm, her eyes on him, her eyes, knowing, shit –

He unpeels the wire tape and tracking pin, he’s got maybe thirty seconds before someone comes back. He has no idea what kind of distance these things can be tracked from, he’s never had to rely on more than a few kilometres before, but what sort of choice does he have? It’s this or the wind.

The first wire he wraps around the handle hinge of the biggest crate. The second, he slides along the bottom of the box he’d first brought in.

And the third – he looks at the case, can practically feel the icy blue energy emanating from it. His heart is a bloody lump in his mouth, he can barely bring himself to approach it, only he _has_ to, so he unpeels the third tape and he presses it directly under the handle of the case. It pricks his fingers, like an electric shock, and he steps back, almost topples over into the shelf behind him as –

“Barton?”

It’s Rumlow. Clint tears back from the shelves, his lungs in his throat, and looks up just in time to see Brock step into view, around the indignant guard at the end of the row. His brow is furrowed, but he doesn’t seem much perturbed.

Clint tosses him a double-handed gesture of _what?_

“With me,” Rumlow retorts, beckoning with two fingers.

He turns without anything more, stalking further into the bunker and Clint hastens to follow, a pert smile for the guard as he sidles past.

Their footsteps echo. He’s half expecting to be hauled back out into the sunshine, to some blustering conjecture from Haarman, perhaps. He can still taste sick in the back of his throat, feel the tug of claws behind his belly button.

 _How?_ is all he can think, can’t crash through the roadblock in his mind as he follows the back of Rumlow’s head right, left, into the labyrinth of shelves and units, some covered in a thick film of dust, others freshly disturbed, grubby with wear and tear.

Then he wonders, in his mind’s cruel eye, if he’s about to get shot in the head.

Once the idea has formed, he can’t banish it from his head. Himself, on his knees, Rumlow pressing the muzzle into his scalp.

 _(You should be shot,_ Haarman said – Haarman though, who the fuck cares what he thinks – _You should be –)_

Clint’s hands gravitate naturally to his thigh but there’s no gun, of course there isn’t, he took the thing off, idiot. He’s breathing slowly, blinking through the violet pulse of his headache as it burrows into his brain. There’s an impenetrable darkness around them, barely touched by the greyish light from behind them.

He’s not going to die in freaking New Jersey.

Rumlow stops, and in his distracted resolve Clint nearly walks into him.

There’s a pause – stretched, painful, nervous, _Nobody’s executing you,_ he said, he swore – then Rumlow turns on a flashlight. His face is thrown into sharp relief, grumpy, square-jawed, definitely an executioner at work.

Clint very nearly laughs.

“What’s up, man?” he asks, and he knows he’s slipped up, can see it in the way Rumlow’s eyes narrow but he holds it, owns it.

Maybe, just maybe, he can play it off as –

Rumlow snorts, face turning briefly to the ground as he shakes his head. His teeth are there and gone in a flashing smile that Clint returns weakly.

“Got something for you from the boss,” Rumlow says and –

Oh. Clint raises his eyebrows in curiosity, his breath still caught in his throat but it doesn’t taste of deathly fear anymore.

He’s never had a present from _the boss_ before. Clint’s been getting drip-fed information and missions for _years,_ and without fail, it’s always come from _above._ It was always Rumlow, and before that Morley, and before that –

 _The boss?_ That is something, someone, very specific.

“Should I be sending a thank you note to Asgard’s prisons?” he asks, because he’s a moron.

Thankfully, the sly dig wipes any lingering suspicion from Rumlow’s face. He chuckles, dirty in the dark.

“Not sure you’ll be so keen soon,” Rumlow warns him, then holds out a small box which flips open at the slide of his thumb along a thin metal clasp.

Inside are seven tiny discs. Clint’s seen them before. Hell, he’s used them a thousand times.

“What’s this for?” he asks breezily. “My cell on the Raft?”

Rumlow fixes him with a look, amused and annoyed. He tilts his head and Clint feels the disbelief blow over his face, irrepressible as the stone plummeting through his guts.

“Are you kidding me?” he demands, nearly shouts it and only just catches it into a strained whisper as he leans into Rumlow’s face. “You realise Stark has an actual AI in-house, don’t you? Nothing gets past Stark’s tech; the AI would sniff out a bug immediately.”

Rumlow grimaces.

“We know,” he says. “Just take ‘em, OK? If you can even get one planted, it would be more than we’ve managed to get on Stark in years.”

Clint doesn’t bother hiding his glower as he takes the box, snapping it shut like the clamp of hungry jaws. Bizarrely, Rumlow actually grins at him.

“Thanks, Barton,” he says, to which Clint makes long obligatory grumbling sounds as they trudge back out towards the others.

As he walks, slipping the box into a pocket, he wonders at Rumlow’s wording.

 _…in years,_ he’d said. HYDRA has had an in on Stark before.

When?

Rickard is waiting for them back at the entrance, eager puppy. Rumlow makes a grumble of his own that Clint snickers at, throwing an arm over the younger man’s shoulders just for good measure, and to see Rumlow roll his eyes.

“Good to go, Boss,” Rickard says.

His words are mangled on their way out of his mouth by Clint’s forearm pressing down on his throat as they traipse out of the dank dark bunker, into the shards of sunlight jagging through the clouds. Clint winces, tugging his sunglasses back off his shirt collar and sliding them over his squinting eyes.

“Echo, we’re moving out,” Rumlow bellows from behind them.

“Come on, Killer,” Rickard continues. “You can chicken out of poker night all you want, but I am a word association _machine.”_

Clint laughs, louder than is required of him, almost loud enough to block out Rumlow’s dry interruption.

“Psycho Killer already has a ride. With Haarman.”

Clint mimes grabbing his own noose to choke himself with, before tripping ahead of the disgruntled congregation of guards while singing _Fa-Fa-Fa Faa Fa-Fa_ under his breath. Rumlow kicks at his knees, catching one calf with a steel cap.

“Rumlow,” Nielson calls out, walking decidedly away from the two agents clustered in front of Haarman, neither of whom Clint recognises.

“Come on,” he says, beckoning to Rickard. “We’re out of here before someone sics Chopper on us.”

For all his bravado, Rickard still double-takes at his wave, frowning at Clint in wary surprise.

“Barton,” Rumlow grumbles sternly over Nielson’s shoulder.

Clint raises his eyebrows, shrugging innocently as he replies coolly: “Shit to do, Boss.”

He thinks about tapping his pocket, however there’s pressing his luck with Rumlow and then there’s actually looking to get accidentally terminated on a routine mission. By the look on Rumlow’s face as he snorts, Clint’s coming very close to mis-stepping his mark.

 _“Psycho Killer?”_ he mouths back with a thumbs up, _“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”_ as he pushes Rickard by the shoulder blades towards the exit road, where the three vehicles are lined up and waiting for the return journey.

In his pocket, the box he’s been gifted with weighs heavy, heavier than the cloudy headache swelling behind his eyes. Rickard’s surprise is loud, his glee a mere wobble in his smirk, and Clint smothers the thoughts racing through his skull with the tepid relief of the prospect of the next four hours, free of snippy sidelooks and burning tones of resentment.

He slides into the driver’s seat, and wonders silently to himself whether or not he’ll find Kate and her smiley scarred mutt in his apartment when he gets back. Wonders if she’ll stay this time, long enough to learn a thing or two about who she can trust.

He really fucking hopes so.

*

**a third impression**

*

Clint waited in the interrogation room for over three hours.

After the first hour, he was offended that SHIELD would stoop to such basic intimidation tactics, like he was nothing more than a two-bit thug the police had picked up during a drug bust.

After the second, he had swung back around to enjoying the idea that he had a gathering of SHIELD’s finest on the other side of the one-way mirror and decided to make the most of it. He managed to get through around two-thirds of Whitney Houston’s greatest hits before the boredom struck again.

He tried playing eye spy, and the shopping list game, and invisible solitaire, but it was a hopeless effort.

By the time the door squeaked open, he was more than a little bit pissed.

“Sorry, I don’t take requests. My Mariah Carey’s a bit pitchy so you’ll have to – Agent Philip Coulson!”

He dropped the front legs of his chair back down with a heavy thud, feet sliding off the table as his mouth dropped open.

Coulson hadn’t changed at all since Clint had last seen him, that time, that night, when he lowered his gun from where it was trained on Clint’s forehead and instead pulled out a switchblade that looked a hell of a lot like he’d grabbed it straight out of some unsuspecting punk teenager’s hand.

He was wearing that same pleasant smile on his face again, and carrying an incredibly thin manila file that he held against his chest, trapping his flat blue tie in place.

“Mr Barton,” he said, his soft voice as soothing while Clint was conscious as it had been when he was mostly dead. “You look well.”

Clint wasn’t at all sure he could agree with Coulson’s generous assessment. He had two staples in his face, a zebra patterned band-aid on his nose, and he hadn’t showered in at least two days longer than was acceptable for normal human interaction.

Then again, speaking in relative terms, Coulson’s definition of _well_ was possibly synonymous with _alive,_ in which case, yes. He was well.

“You look like you’ve been chained to a desk for the past year,” Clint replied, not bothering to suppress his grin. “Nicholas riding you hard?”

Coulson’s mouth moved in what some jury’s might have ruled to be an inkling of a smile. Clint took it as his first win gladly, resting his forearms on the table edge while Coulson swept into the chair opposite. He laid the file flat on the table between them.

“So, Clint,” Coulson said. “I understand you have some information you’d like to share with us.”

Clint looked down at Coulson’s fingers, calloused, spread over in a fan across the file, which could not have held more than one or two pages. At the top of it, in faded black print, it read: _HAWKEYE. BARTON, C. F._

He looked up into Coulson’s smiling eyes.

“You could say that, Agent Philip Coulson.”

It was a definitely a smile, that time.

*


	5. PART ONE: Chapter IV

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To all readers new and returning, thank you for sticking with me! ^_^
> 
> I hope you are safe and sane and well. This story is...something a little different from my usual style, and I'm enjoying the ride - I hope you do too! Thank you endlessly for all the lovely comments and kudos :*
> 
> Yours,  
> LRCx

*

** PART ONE **

** Chapter IV **

*

**a discussion**

*

Clint was lying on the bed by the time the Doc arrived, having given into the pull of the scratchy covers and the cheap mattress, the kind only to be found in SHIELD temporary quarters. It was for the best, Medical had decided, that he not be housed with the other agents in the usual ward.

Something about how Clint had been the one to put most of them there, probably.

He lay on his back, enjoyed the deep ache from the stitches holding him together. It was like a hand pushing constantly on a bruise, a solid presence, a reminder. He stared up at the off-white ceiling and when there was a knock on the door in a different rhythm to all the medics, he said: “Y’ello.”

The woman that walked in was familiar. Honey brown hair tied up in a ponytail, with soft trails dropping on either side of her thin face. Thirties, maybe, wearing a pair of professional looking square glasses and a neutral shade of lipstick.

A nice grey turtleneck sweater and black slacks. A visitor’s badge around her neck that swings at her midriff from a borrowed lanyard.

“Hello, Agent Barton,” she said, reeds of East Coast in her voice, further north than New York. It was in the fraction of a beat before she spoke that he remembered her. “I’m Doctor Ashley Myerson. Do you remember me? We met a few years ago.”

Clint pushed himself up lazily, elbows first, then hands, heaving his weight despite the trembling of his muscles until he was sitting on his thin pillows, so the wall behind him could continue the mattress’ good work on his bruised spine.

“I sure do, Doc,” he told her with a smile as bland as her lipstick. “What can I do for you?”

The Doc pointed with question mark brows to a chair and he nodded. She pulled it closer to his bed.

In her lap, she had a closed notebook with a pen hooked into the cover by the lid.

“I’m hoping it will be more a case of what I can do for you,” she said in a deliberately appeasing voice that made Clint want to say something horrible and lewd, the way he was pretty sure he had done the last time they spoke.

He almost restrained himself. With a tight lipped grin, he folded his arms smugly across his chest.

“You here to talk to me about a short drop and a sudden stop?”

Doctor Ashley Myerson pursed her lips and – there, yes. He did remember her. A tiny bit younger, a tiny bit greener, with different glasses and a pretty headband pushing back her hair. He’d forgotten how blue her eyes were, a shade designed to make him flinch.

“No,” she told him, still not opening her notebook. “Unless that’s something you’ve been thinking about.”

Clint snorted, and wished he hadn’t folded his arms already so he could do it now, instead of having to speak. He settled for crossing his ankles on his bed, to match.

“How could I not? It’s your ideal outcome, right?”

The Doc grimaced, lacing her fingers on her lap. Clint would have accused her of lacking professionalism, only, she’d already had perfect control of her facial expressions three years ago, so he was certain it was deliberately done.

“Actually,” she said to him in that same, infuriatingly calm voice, words wriggling unpleasantly under Clint’s bruised and stitched skin. “My ideal outcome would be that we talk now, and tomorrow. That we perhaps meet once a day, for the next week. Then every few days, until eventually, we’re meeting once a fortnight, and you are feeling settled and ready to return to your full duties as an Agent of SHIELD.”

Clint gave a short laugh, like a cut in the roof of his mouth.

“But not an Avenger,” he surmised, and pretended it didn’t sting, like a cut in the roof of his mouth, too.

The Doc shrugged, innocuous, unreadable.

“Only if that’s something you want, Agent Barton. Not something you feel you owe the Agency, or in fact anyone. May I call you Clint?”

Perhaps it was something about the pretty drift of her hair tickling her face, or the crystal of her eyes. It got inside Clint too quickly, slipped into the fortress behind his crossed arms and his snarling grin.

“Do I get to call you Ashley, or will it be Doctor Myerson?”

“Ashley is fine, just like last time.”

Rightly admonished, Clint felt against his will his smirk loosening around the around.

“Then so is Clint,” he said.

“Very well, Clint,” Ashley said, reading up to adjust her glasses on the long slope of her nose. “I want you to understand something very important, Clint.”

Clint, for his part, simply raised his eyebrows readily. He had a feeling he was going to be hearing his name a _lot_ from Doctor Ashley Myerson. He had a feeling he was going to be getting a lot of personhood reminders in general.

Insensibly to his own bristling instincts, he felt oddly soothed.

Ashley gave no sign she had noticed, and only continued.

“My role here, as it was when we met before, is as an objective third party. I am here for you, for your benefit. I am contracted by SHIELD, but I am not an employee on Nick Fury’s payroll. My priority is your welfare, not your status as an operative and not your usefulness to the World Security Council.”

He remembered that little speech from the last time, too. The not so subtle cover-up, the comfort of _not your usefulness_ that belied the _not your status._ She had no investment in serving him up on a platter, nor did she feel obliged to help him claw back the shards of his SHIELD career.

Clint didn’t bother interrupting, this time. He knew all the things she couldn’t tell him, now.

“These sessions will not be recorded,” Ashley said, which – actually. Was that new? He didn’t remember that from last time. “Nor will my notes ever be saved electronically. The things we talk about will not be shared with anyone without a subpoena ordered by the Supreme Court. The last time somebody tried that with one of my SHIELD clients, it was refused on the grounds that revealing details discussed in my sessions would pose a threat to national and even global security. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Clint blinked, and idly wondered if it was worth asking who that client had been.

Natasha would probably know.

Ashley sat with her back leaning into the chair, seemingly oblivious to the deadweight of her words in the distance between them. She had a kind face, and Clint couldn’t tell if he hated it or not. He didn’t enjoy kindness. At least, not the unreserved type. It was an unpredictable thing, the unsolicited kindness of others.

After a moment, though, he nodded a shy, laughing nod.

“You’re saying the more I talk to you now, the less you’ll be allowed to say when the WSC comes sniffing around.”

Ashley smiled indulgently.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They might own Director Fury’s ass, but they don’t own mine.”

Clint laughed, despite himself. He would pay good money to watch this woman interact with Fury. He was certain it would be a hell of a show.

“How fortunate for both of us,” he told her.

“Indeed,” Ashley agreed. “So, now we’ve got that cleared up, I have a question I’d like to ask you.”

“Is it about my childhood?” Clint asked breezily, rubbing his fingers through his hair, only to remember too late the weapons he had handed her, the last time they sat together like this.

“No, Clint,” Ashley retorted. “We already talked about your childhood. Last time. Remember? You had some colourful anecdotes, as I recall. No, I saw from your testimony you stated that you had no recollection of your time under Loki’s control, beyond incoherent flashes. Is that correct?”

Clint’s tongue felt far too big for his mouth, and when he blinked, he wasn’t entirely sure he did it quickly enough.

“That’s what I said,” he replied with a rusty cough.

Ashley nodded, and her face changed, gently. It was as if her smile sank into her face, leaving her calm, like her lipstick, unlike her eyes. She moved her glasses again, tugging a trapped few strands of hair from the frames.

It was her delicacy he didn’t like, Clint decided, as he looked at her face, and pretended his own wasn’t heating up.

“I understand why lying was in your best interests last night, Clint.” He was confident he hadn’t flinched, but her eyes said something else. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Fury told you to lie. But I’m inviting you now to talk freely.”

Clint cleared his throat.

“That’s not a question, Ashley.”

He’d forgotten, some time in the last three years, the way she looked when she was being pointedly patient. How unpleasantly it reminded him of the sad, empty faces of the horses from the circus, where he’d learnt the lessons of waiting best.

“What do you remember about the days you spent under Loki’s control?” Ashley asked.

Clint opened his mouth, and he honestly meant to tell her.

He meant to talk about Selvig’s excitement and the thrum of activity, men and women looking at Clint for answers while Clint looked at Loki, Loki looking at everything and hearing even more. The fresh slap of the wind on his face standing in the back of that jet, drawing his bow and firing into the current of the air, knowing he’d hit his target.

Instead, his tongue got the better of him. Fluttered anxious, ticklish in between his teeth.

“It was Hill who told me to lie, actually,” he said, and he could feel defensiveness rising up his throat, burning like bile. “She told me what happened and then she told me it was for the best if I just forgot everything. It was like she didn’t give a shit. Do you think she even feels emotions?”

He laughed as he said it, a little hysterical, could hear it in his own voice and feel it in his throat and it hurt something awful, ripped out of him like the look in Nat’s eyes when she let herself in, a few hours later.

Ashley, undeterred, unclasped her hands and held her notebook instead. Still, she didn’t open it.

“I am confident that Deputy Director Hill feels emotions,” she said coolly. “What about you? What did it feel like, when Loki was controlling you?”

Suddenly, overwhelming and intrusive, Clint wished one of the awkward interns from Medical were here, saying uncomfortable mumble-jumbles like _when you were, umm, not yourself_ and _before we got you back._ Ashley, with her braying determination, unflinching from the truth, speaking with that delicate fucking face that he could cave in too easily with one hand tied behind his back.

A vice gripped him, like a puppeteer holding his strings, and he told her.

“It was like trying to float in the sea, when the tide is going out rough.”

A faint line appeared in Ashley’s brow. Her lips parted, but she did not speak. It was as if she was listening to the faintest tin whistle, playing on the other side of the wall.

Clint’s teeth hurt. His toenails and his kneecaps and his ribcage. He pushed back against the wall, for the searing yank of the stitches, forcing it out of him, so that the words could belong to the pain, and not to himself. They were the words of needles and glass marks, not Clint Barton.

“There were these moments of calm. You’re being pulled along, you can’t control it – but, you know who you are, and where you are. And it’s OK.”

That penetrating stillness, he couldn’t recapture it in a thousand years of meditation, couldn’t find it even if he lay in a dark and silent room and spent an eternity in peaceful solitude. It was an intrinsic thing. A terrible thing. A marvellous thing.

“But then, a wave comes. Hits you. And then there’s just – freezing, blue panic. You’re under the surface and you can’t breathe and you haven’t a clue which way’s up or down, and by the time you’re above water again, you just barely catch your breath before another fucking wave hits you. And it’s worse next time cause you still haven’t got over the last one.

“It’s just this cycle of bullshit fear and calm, over and over and over until they’re both happening at the same time and –”

He choked on the happy ending, the way he choked on them in the picture books as a kid. Nonsensical, the lot of them.

“And?” Ashley asked, when he closed his mouth.

Like a light in a tunnel, like oxygen undersea: “And then, Natasha broke me out of it.”

Ashley nodded, as if she understood, as if she possibly could.

“OK,” she told him, thoughtfully. She still hadn’t opened her goddamn notebook. “Let’s just take a moment to look at your analogy.”

“What do you mean?”

He felt it, the defensiveness, and he saw it in the blue of her eyes that forced him back into the hard wall, until the pain reached his front, too.

“I mean,” Ashley said, quietly, simply. “The waves, hitting you. The panic. Were they the moments when Loki had the most control over you, or were they the moments when you tried to fight back?”

Clint let out the breath he had been holding, and realised the burning in his chest had been nothing but dizziness. He sucked in another, and it ghosted in front of his eyes. Sparks of hungry dizziness, eating up his vision.

“The, uh. The second one. When I tried to fight, when I –”

He found didn’t have the voice for _when I shot Fury in the chest instead of the head,_ but he could tell Ashley understood. Enough for now, at least. She picked up her notebook, but only to place it underneath her chair. Her hands wrapped around one of her knees, and for the first time she leaned ever so slightly towards him.

“It must be difficult,” she said, very slowly, and her words had never sounded more carefully chosen. “Reconciling your feelings of calm with the idea of being controlled by another person. By a god, who had so much power over you.”

The sound that barked out of Clint might have been a laugh. It scratched him up, and maybe Ashley too, because she sat up straighter again. Sky eyes cloudy.

“You know the worst, funniest thing?” Clint asked, and even through the fog of loneliness surrounding him Clint could tell he was speaking too loudly, too brashly, dispelling any meagre illusion he might have sustained that he was holding himself together like a goddamn adult. “I can’t ever remember feeling as calm, as, as _OK,_ as I felt when Loki first got me with that spear. For those first few seconds, when I holstered my weapon. I was so, focused. So sure.”

He couldn’t pinpoint it, the exactness, the precision. He had been fighting, and Loki had spoken to him, had _seen_ him, and then, then.

The coolness of the sea, wrapping around him, as he stayed afloat despite the roughness of the tide.

Behind it all, beyond it, the adrenaline of an arrow notched between his fingers and the roar of a candy floss crowd and the bruises on his brother’s cheeks and the nuns at the convent praying for his sinner’s soul. All that loudness and that brightness, quietened like a layer of dust settling.

Ashley waited for him to find it, the exactness, the precision.

Clint said, under his breath, as if to make it less true,

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so calm before in all my life. How messed up is that?”

“Clint,” Ashley replied, his name in her mouth again. If she said it once more it would probably stop meaning anything at all. “What you experienced is – beyond our comprehension. Really, the human equivalent of that level of brain washing? It’s not possible. Even if it were, it would take a long, long time to do what Loki managed to do to you and Dr Selvig in seconds. You can’t judge the feelings you had in the moment, or afterwards, by reasonable standards.”

She paused, before adopting a wry smile that she leaned into leftways.

“Actually, you should never judge your feelings with reason. Feelings are by nature rarely reasonable. We can try to understand them, and rationalise them, but you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself for feeling them.”

“Well, you’re just filling me with confidence, Ashley,” Clint retorted breezily, riding the wave of a laugh, unable to tell if it was fake or not. It was starting to feel the same either way. “I’m so freaking glad you’re in my corner.”

Ashley hummed, one eyebrow cocked.

“Would you like to talk about your childhood some more?”

“Fuck no.”

“Very well,” she replied, with an expression that said _I thought as much._ “Let’s keep talking about this, instead. Are the memories equally coherent, or do you remember some parts more easily or vividly than others?”

Clint wanted to think the follow-up to this would be, _So you can learn how to forget them,_ but he doubted that would be the case.

He tried to say, _Nothing,_ or perhaps _the hand on my shoulder that steered me north,_ or even _the look on Agent Reiner’s face when I shot him in the eye._ But he couldn’t, and what came out, it was easy as breathing. Always had been, probably always would be, a constant in his heart, one of the only ones to take root there.

“Natasha,” he said, and he wondered if one day it would sound different, sound less like his own name in reverse. “I remember fighting Natasha more than the rest of it. The details.”

That, at least, was true. He could remember her close up, the hefty swing of her kick and the jab of her elbow, her teeth breaking skin.

“Do you think that’s because it’s the most recent part?” Ashley asked, and her indifference stung, then soothed instantaneously. There was something to be said for the unaffected therapist schtick. “Agent Romanoff’s account suggests you were confused when you first woke up. You weren’t sure what had happened.”

Clint would very much have liked to know what else Agent Romanoff’s account suggested. He doubted it was even forty percent of the full story.

Ashley had this daring look about her, then. As if she knew Clint was going to lie to her, or at the very least bullshit her with an appeasement. It rankled him. He never could back down from a challenge; it was Barney’s winning hand when they were kids and then it was Nick Fury’s, later on, when Clint had grown up but not outgrown himself.

Angered by the assumption, Clint squeezed his fingers into his tired forearms and lashed back.

“It was the most frightened I’d been the whole time.”

He should have known Ashley wouldn’t so much as twitch, but for some reason, he was still disappointed when all she did was tilt her head.

“In what way?” she asked.

Clint closed his eyes, conjuring it up from the pit of his stomach, dragged it from his deep corners, where truths hid best.

“Even when I – when I knew what was going on, when I was trying to fight back for control, it didn’t feel real, you know? I guess I was – dissociating, or whatever you want to call it.”

He flashed her a glance, haughty, and might have grinned at her _probably_ type of shrug if he didn’t think it would cleave his face apart. He could feel, for the first time, sweat on the back of his neck, about to tickle down to his stitches.

“But fighting Tasha. At one point I – I pulled her hair.”

He grimaced sheepishly, and by the anticipation in Ashley’s eyes, it was clear she did not understand this was the punchline. So, he read it out to her in primary colours, red like Nat’s hair in his vice grip.

“I did that, once. A few times. On the mats, or at a vending machine. Just, kidding around, you know? Teasing her. And when I felt her hair in my hand on the ‘carrier. In that moment. While I’m trying to stab her in the fucking throat?”

He’d come so close to it, might have even grazed her chin, she wouldn’t let him see, wouldn’t let him check, later. He saw the shape of his hand on her arm though, and three dotted fingerprints at her neck.

Clint tried to swallow the sand coating his tongue, soaking up the saliva when he licked his lips.

“It was one of those big waves. Like everything was suddenly real, like I suddenly _knew_ myself again but I still couldn’t stop it. I was terrified.”

Ashley’s nod was small, just there enough to hold back anything more than her next, most obvious question.

“Were you afraid that she would kill you, or that you would kill her?”

Clint knew what it was she thought he’d say, and maybe he should, only, Ashley didn’t know Natasha, couldn’t possibly understand and he wasn’t sure he had the words in any language. Didn’t want to try. He’d exposed enough of Natasha already, to Loki, against every fibre of his instinct.

“Both,” he said, and he enjoyed the way her eyebrows lifted ever so slightly. He wasn’t surprised; she’d been there to document his suicidal tendencies the first time around, after all. “Shit, both.”

He laughed, a trilling sound, too high pitched in the back of his throat as he remembered the scrape of Nat’s teeth over his forearm.

“I – I wanted her to stop me. I wanted her to kill me before I killed her but even then, when I – I knew. I remembered. I knew she never, ever wanted to kill another friend. It would’ve – would’ve hurt her so bad. I didn’t want that for her.”

Never did, never could – dragged her in from the cold just to keep her knives out of the throats of people who would haunt her worst. He had scars belonging to the people she might have loved and lost. He’d seen her grief up close and personal, and he hated it worse than his own.

“Don’t,” he corrected, fast and breathless. “I don’t want that for her. And there’s no point in lying, _Doc._ If I’d woken up from that damned spell or, or whatever it was, and realised I had killed her? I would’ve eaten a bullet on the spot. And if you want to mark me down as unfit for duty for that, just fucking try it.”

He tried to stick his nose in the air as obstinate as his words but he found the strain too hard.

Ashley’s face was too calm, her hair too brown, her lips too pink. Her hands too still and her glasses too shiny. Everything too much, reflecting back the knives of his accusations.

When she spoke, it was in that low, firelit register, that he remembered from before.

“Like I said, Clint. I’m not here for you as an operative. I’m here for you as a human being. I do not have a say in your field status. I can make recommendations to you and to Director Fury, but neither of you are obligated to follow those recommendations.”

Perhaps because the alternative was to buckle completely, sink deeper into the thin pillows and the springy mattress, Clint snorted a laugh.

“I killed dozens of agents, and you honestly think you’re going to recommend me for active duty, whatever the fuck I say?”

 _Hot-blooded,_ his mother used to call him, and so did one of the foster parents before the circus collected up the scraps of the Barton family.

 _Damnable fool,_ his dad would correct her, and the reality was, Clint knew which one of them was closer to being right.

Ashley, for the first time, steeled over. It was something in her eyes, because her hands, they stayed soft, and her mouth didn’t pinch, and her legs didn’t draw back. It was just a way of seeing him, like a screen shuttering to block out the worst of the sun.

The room about them, Clint realised for the first time, was horribly cold.

“If I decide to recommend you be kept off duty, Clint, it won’t be because of Loki, or the things he made you do,” Ashley said, all lungs, no teeth.

Clint instinctively felt his bones shrinking back, joints stiff.

Ashley’s thumbs crossed over themselves, and her hands abruptly went from clasped to praying.

She said: “It will be because your handler, your _partner,_ died yesterday. And so far, I haven’t seen you show a single sign of recognising that.”

Clint heard her voice the same way he heard Loki’s. Underwater, thick. Through the lockjaw that seized him, the spark of need to roll over and go straight to sleep, he smiled his hardest, meanest smile.

“Would you like me to cry, Doctor Ashley Myerson?” he asked. “Will that look better in your file?”

He remembered, last time, the shadow standing over his bed. The dark, wintry voice that told him: _You will sit in that goddamn chair and talk to her, Barton, or I swear to God I will have you thrown in a safehouse in Antarctica and watched by Big Brother until your fiftieth fucking birthday._

He remembered, last time, the way she said: _Ashley is fine, Clint. Phil, if you’d like to go make yourself some tea, I’m sure we’ll be perfectly alright for a few minutes._

Now, with her blue, blue eyes and her soft, soft hair.

“I want you to understand that you can,” she said, instead. “That you’re allowed to, now.”

He blinked, momentarily forgetting what he’d said in the first place, and when he recalled his offer to cry, he almost laughed again, except for how he could taste the wetness of sick in his mouth.

Ashley’s forearms rested lightly on her knees, her face closer, close enough to cave it in, if he wanted. One fist behind his back.

“I want to make sure you understand that Phil Coulson died yesterday. Because I’m not sure you’ve let yourself acknowledge it yet.”

Clint felt as if his lips would break apart at the seams if he smiled any wider. It was brittle in his mouth and on his face.

It ached.

He leaned in, just a little, too. At the twist of his back, the sweat dripped from his hairline down his spine, stinging its way into the stitches.

“The King is dead,” he murmured, as much to himself as to her. “Long live the King.”

Her blue eyes were cold, and they did not believe him, and so he turned away.

*


	6. PART ONE: Chapter V

*

** PART ONE **

** Chapter V **

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

It’s raining by the time they reach New York.

Heavy fat droplets that bounce off the road and leave the windscreen wipers whining with the effort. Clint’s always liked driving in the rain. He likes being dry and warm while the storm outside does its best to batter in, and he cuts cleanly through it all on wheels that slice through the puddles in sheets of wet.

He remembers learning how to drive by way of necessity. He remembers being good at it, learning to be useful.

And before that, he remembers his dad. Remembers kneeling between the front seats of his dad’s Chevy, grinning while his dad let him share hold on the steering wheel, going around in figures of eight across a wide expanse of long grass. Barney’s shriek of laughter as he punched at the radio every time it started to go haywire. Grabbing clumsily at the clutch, the way their dad told him to.

It had been good, sometimes. For all the depths of his flaws, Clint has never quite been able to forget how hard his dad tried, sometimes. It was never about not trying, where Clint’s dad was concerned, just the inevitability of his failure.

It is, after all, in the Barton blood to get things wrong.

It’s raining, and New York is filled up grey as they speed through the docks along the Hudson, and Rickard has exhausted every one of his limited in-car interrogation techniques to pry some prime Stark-gossip out of Clint.

Clint has no qualms about leaving Rickard hanging. By the time he’s dumped the truck for pick-up and returned to the warehouse for his gear and bike, his hair is plastered to his head and his clothes are soaked through. His headache has mercifully disappeared into its nucleus form in the very centre of his brain. An itchy, fuzzy feeling that hasn’t really left since the tip of that glowing spear landed in the dip of his sternum.

He scratches at it, absent minded, until his nails start to hurt in their beds.

The streets are heaving – with rain, with traffic, with the misery of a city still picking itself back up. Clint hasn’t quite gotten his head around how close the entirety of New York City came to annihilation. Just a few minutes – a few _seconds,_ maybe – one way or the other, and everything would have been reduced to rubble, whether by Loki or the World Security Council.

Clint wonders, sometimes, if there’s all that much of a difference between the two.

He cuts through the worst of the traffic, his knees frozen stiff around his bike, his helmet uncomfortably sticking around his ears and neck. The world is muffled, by the visor and the rain, a dull greyness that seeps into the leather, turning his joints to rust.

Without really thinking about it, he lets instinct guide him to Bed-Stuy, down backroads and through alleyways, circuiting a labyrinth of misdirection without even meaning to.

In no time at all, he’s at the apartment block. He stashes the bike in its usual dubious resting place behind a long abandoned skip that takes up most of the east facing alley and hauls himself up the fire escape stairs, fingers slipping on the metal as he swings up over the barrier onto the first floor and beyond.

His third floor apartment is dark, when he reaches it. Usually it’s easier to crawl into his bedroom from the fire escape, but he decides not to risk it. If Katie-Kate has deigned to stay, she’s probably helped herself to the master bedroom, seeing as how Clint has never actually gotten around to fixing the heating in the spare room, and if she’s in there, well –

Clint usually likes his chances against an underfed homeless teenager, but if he can avoid getting kicked in the balls, he’d prefer it.

The kitchen and living space windows are jammed, a quirk of his own making specifically to make it harder to break it. He’d been pleased with himself at the time, but looking back, he should have anticipated just how often he was going to need to break into his own apartment and done himself a favour or three.

The blinds are closed, the lights off, and as soon as the window shifts up far enough to get his fingers under he puts his mouth to the gap and says: “Kate, it’s me. Do not kick me in the face. Or anywhere else. OK? Kate?”

For a moment, there’s nothing.

Then, there’s a yipping bark from a dog, followed by a growl.

“Ah, shit,” he mutters.

He scoops his hands deeper under the window, braces one foot against the ledge, and pulls up, leaning into the left side, where it catches without help.

The dog’s barking gets more enthusiastic, and Clint mutters a quick prayer that he’s going to keep all his fingers, before shoving his hand through the wider gap to unlatch the rest of the window from the inside.

“Katie?” he says, louder. Spits out a mouthful of rain and ducks his head again.

He feels the cool metal bolt, fumbles for a moment, then unhooks it.

One more shove, and the window creaks the rest of the way up. It’s still barely a wide enough gap for a fully grown man to wriggle through.

Clint slides in feet first, whispering a long stream of _“good boy good doggie who’s a good dog who’s not going to bite Hawkeye’s dick off that’s right you are you good boy nice and calm good boy” ­_ until he’s inside, crouched on the floor under the fluttering blind with rainwater spilling in from the outside.

Across the room, Kate is sitting with the dog in her lap on the far end of the sofa, watching with visible amusement.

“Thanks for nothing, asshole,” Clint says with a deliberate frown.

Kate’s mouth twitches.

“You looked like you had everything under control,” she says, scratching at the dog’s head with her thumbs.

She looks a hell of a lot better than she did yesterday. Her raven hair is shorter, freshly washed, and she’s wearing what looks like three sweaters and a pair of joggers Clint probably shoved in a drawer three years ago and hasn’t touched since. The bruise at her mouth is more obvious now, and so is the scratch on her cheek, but both look like they’ve been treated at least.

The dog, too, looks a lot happier. Fur cleaned, the scars on its face are red and obvious, but he’s squirming comfortably in Kate’s arms, tail thumping, and he barks once happily when Clint stands up and shuts the window behind him.

When he turns back around, he takes in the open empty takeout cartons on the coffee table with a morose sigh.

“Why are you sitting here in the dark?” Clint asks, and tries not to sound too accusatory but Kate’s raised eyebrows suggest he has failed on that front.

“We were napping,” she says primly. “You woke us up.”

Clint shrugs in lieu of an apology, scrubs a hand over his rain-soaked hair and peels his leather jacket off.

“I’m going to shower, eat some pizza rolls, pack up some shit and then I’ll be out of your hair,” he says with a little curtsy.

“I hope you brought pizza rolls,” Kate says with a delicate smirk.

Clint narrows his eyes.

“I have some in the freezer.”

“You did.”

“Ugh,” Clint groans dramatically. “My pizza rolls, Katie-Kate? I mean, my jacket is one thing, but my _pizza rolls?”_

Kate slides herself into a recline across the sofa, bundling the dog up over her chest where he snuffles at her neck and slaps her stomach with his tail. She’s wearing a defiant expression, but Clint doesn’t think he’s imagining the defensive, cautious angles of her shoulders, the way her eyes dart up and over his frame in an all too familiar check.

He smiles with half his face, crouches with gentle ease and reaches out to stroke the dog’s back, pretending not to notice. He laughs when the dog huffs, and continues to pretend not to notice when Kate relaxes her grip on the dog’s neck.

“What’s he called?” Clint asks casually, and despite his better judgement he lets himself slump into sitting. He can worry about getting back up again in a few minutes. Or maybe an hour, or maybe tomorrow.

Kate gives a jerky little shrug, somewhere between a _don’t know_ and a _don’t care_ , which Clint doesn’t believe for a second. The dog rolls onto his side in Kate’s arms, showing his belly, and Kate mutters _“Little slut”_ under her breath.

Clint snickers.

“Well, if we’re out of pizza rolls, I guess I’ll just have to suck it up and order real pizza. Want some?”

“I could eat,” Kate replies, with another of those shrugs that Clint is sure he’s going to get sick of pretty quickly.

“I was asking the dog,” he says, sniffing and rubbing more water trickles off his face.

The sound Kate makes might, in some States, be considered a laugh. He takes it as a win.

“Order some pizza,” he tells her, ruffling the dog once more before pushing himself wearily back to his feet. “There’s money under the cutlery. I’m going to shower. Jesus, I feel like I took a swim in the Hudson.”

“You _smell_ like you took a swim in the Hudson.”

Clint smiles cheerily in response, stands right next to Kate’s head and shakes his arms out, splattering her with droplets of water.

“Fuck you, Hawkeye!” she yelps, squirming away and making another almost-laugh sound.

He grins, heading towards the bathroom with nothing more than a _“Margheritas are for douchebags!”_ thrown over his shoulder in response.

*

**a meeting**

*

 _Hey,_ he said, in the kind of voice he could only wish someone had used on him, when he was young and frightened and alone. _Hey, I’m Hawkeye._

 _What the fuck kind of a name is Hawkeye?_ She asked, before spitting more blood between her knees.

He smiled, for a whole host of reasons, and replied: _A pretty stupid one. But it’s mine. It’s all I had, when I had nothing else._

He could see her fury, the product of despair left too long to fester. Strong enough to dry the choked-up tears out of her eyes.

She spat into his hand when he held it out to help her stand, but she took the sandwich he offered her, and limped easily at his slow pace as he walked the handful of blocks towards a free clinic. Even let him hold her ruined sweater while she got cleaned up.

It was a slow thing, their friendship. A fast one, too.

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

It takes a monumental feat of resistance not to hunker down post-pizza for a few hours of rest in his own bed.

By the time Clint’s leaving, the day is well and truly over, and the rain has eased into a grim mist that lies over everything. The city is stuck in the muddy air limbo of the muggy clear skies. He climbs back out of the window by which he entered, on account of the truly irritating security camera that the shop across the street had installed four months ago.

Just how much can tarot cards and healing crystals be worth, anyhow? And who the fuck is looking to steal them? Superstitious bootleggers?

Kate waves him off easily, looking a lot more settled than she had seemed when he arrived, and even the dog gives him a lick of his fingers. That might have been him cleaning up some rogue pizza sauce, though.

Clint tries his best to put the thought of them aside. He’s a big believer in implementing the _out of sight, out of mind_ policy when it comes to personal matters. It’s his default state at the best of times.

He walks twelve blocks, gets two buses and doubles back on himself via the metro, followed by another bus. Seventy minutes later he’s traipsing his way up a path lit by unreliably spaced streetlamps, the Hudson River to one side and Riverdale Park up ahead.

It’s the right side of quiet, at this time of night. A straggling collection of last-minute dog walkers, the occasional runner making a quick dash through the park before it closes, a couple of kids on bikes racing loudly up ahead. Not enough people to get lost amidst a crowd, not so empty as for two men on a bench to seem out of place.

Somebody’s already sitting on the bench by the time Clint arrives, but he doesn’t speed up. He walks at a leisurely pace, taking in the sights and smells of greenery and lapping water and wet city. He lets a jogger overtake him, her dark ponytail bouncing over her neck, her neon pink exercise shirt damp along her spine and glowing in the dipped light.

By the time he reaches the bench, she’s disappearing around a corner.

He sits, and the man beside him shuffles a little, his hands hidden in his pockets, the brim of a cap poking out of his hood. They share, for a leisurely moment, the peaceable ebb of the evening’s race towards night.

“Good day for it,” Fury says in a long, dry voice that might, on another day, have made Clint smirk.

As it is, his fingernails bite into his palms as he stuffs them inside his jacket and he feels some of the taxing strain of his day return. He can feel the needles of anxiety jabbing around his eyes as he squints out, towards where the river snakes through the deep cut vein of the city.

“What happened to the rest of the Phase Two materials, after P.E.G.A.S.U.S. got blown to hell?” he asks.

He does not specify, does not need to specify – _after I blew it to hell._ Goes without saying, really. No room for a pity party here.

Out of the corner of his eye, Clint sees Fury tilt his head, the closest to an acknowledgement of surprise he’s likely to get.

“It’s been kept under wraps in several secure locations, of which no one person knows all the coordinates,” Fury replies, and even on another day, Clint wouldn’t be able to believe him, because Fury is _never_ so forthcoming with information. Not true information, at least.

“Then, _sir,”_ he says through gritted teeth. “Perhaps you could explain to me why I just helped cart three shipments of it to _Europe?”_

“What did you just say?”

“You heard me,” Clint says with a hard laugh that he barely catches behind his teeth, cutting up his mouth with poorly restrained anger. “Three truckloads left New York today. Odds are they’ll be taken to Everglades tonight, transported from there. They’ll be distributed within a week, by the sounds of it.”

Fury swears under his breath, glaring up and down the path with a renewed agitation that Clint hasn’t seen since Stark went off the deep end last year. Clint waits for him to think it over, pulling out the small device tucked into the lining of his jacket and playing with it between his fingers. He offers it up when Fury holds out a hand for it.

“Only managed to tag three containers, but I’m pretty sure most of it’s recoverable. You’ll need to find a way to track it through the pirates that are scheduled to take it. It’s the only way they won’t suspect the supply lines have been spoiled.”

Fury places the tracker inside a sunglasses case, which he slides into a pocket. He leans a little, forearms on his thighs, hands clasped loosely to mask any further reaction.

“Who’s the courier?”

“Ilias Andino, at home he’s Lýkos,” Clint explains, leaning back into the bench and letting out a long breath that’s almost visible. The temperature seems to have dropped alarmingly fast. He wonders, momentarily, if that’s the air, or his own body. “He’s graduated to human trafficking in the last few years. He’ll have some girls on board, so, you should go easy on the firepower.”

Fury doesn’t respond to his request, not that he’d expect him to. Clint knows, if the choice comes down to recovering Phase Two weaponry and liberating a container of abducted girls, which one Fury’s going to prioritise. He also knows Fury would be right to – but, well. There’s good reason why Clint doesn’t enjoy imagining standing in Nick Fury’s shoes, most of the time.

Another runner goes past, then, breathing heavily as he hurries, a water bottle in one hand and his phone in the other with earphones attached by a wire. Clint watches him idly as he disappears down the same route as the woman from before. He closes his eyes, ignoring the prickle under his lids. Christ, he’s tired.

“Anything else?” Fury asks.

Clint worries the tip of his tongue between his teeth, and thinks about the little box of bugs weighing down his conscience, currently sitting underneath a loose tile in his Bed-Stuy bathroom, deactivated and dreadful all the same.

“I think I’m getting yanked up the echelons.”

Fury looks at him, his one eye narrow, creased at the edges. The question mark of his face is all impatience.

“Rumlow mentioned a boss. Think I might see a new face soon – someone a lot higher up the food chain.”

“Theirs, or ours?”

“Both,” Clint says, swallowing down a cough and tucking his elbows tighter to his body. “I think we’ve got somebody else high up left to weasel out. Somebody who knew enough about Phase Two to redistribute it quietly and damn well.”

Fury nods once in understanding, but doesn’t look away.

“Barton,” he says.

Clint turns to look back, tonguing the back of his front teeth.

“Yes sir?”

For a moment, Fury looks as if he’s chewing on a lemon. His eye crumples and widens, and his mouth works around a few unspoken consonants before he says, simply: “Good work.”

Clint nods in return.

“Thank you, sir,” he replies grimly, and sets aside the gnawing worry in his gut. “If you need any help on getting Lýkos –”

“I won’t be calling on you, Barton,” Fury interrupts coolly, and Clint chuckles.

“Fair enough,” he says.

“Anything to report on your new housemates?” Fury asks, though it’s obviously an idle question because he looks away without even paying attention to Clint’s body language.

“Banner’s a great cook,” he says. “And Stark’s better with recycling than SHIELD.”

Fury makes a sound that Clint chooses to interpret as a laugh.

“Report in to my office on Tuesday,” Fury says. “I’ll brief you on DELTA’s next assignment myself.”

Clint barely keeps the frown off his face.

“Sir, the WSC –”

“Tuesday, Agent Barton,” Fury says, and before Clint can say more, he stands up and walks at an unsuspiciously relaxed pace up the path, following the footsteps of the two runners, a shadow disappearing into the descending night.

Clint licks his lips, scratches at the fluff of his hairline and cracks his neck twice. He’s torn between returning to Bed-Stuy, and just staying here on this bench all night.

*

In the end, he walks back to Stark Tower.

It’s long past one in the morning by the time JARVIS welcomes him at the lobby elevator.

*

Clint’s mind is fully focused on raiding the fridge for leftovers, and it’s his baseline alertness alone that makes him aware he’s intruding on another person’s solitude when he exits the elevator at the communal floor.

He keeps the shadowy shape on the long sofa in his periphery as he makes his way to the refrigerator, pulls out a weird coloured smoothie undoubtedly labelled _FOR YOUR LANDLORD, FUCK OFF,_ but, hey! If he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t read it, therefore it doesn’t count.

It tastes absolutely vile, but that probably just means it’s good for him, so he finishes it anyway, dumps the container in the trash and sets about making two coffees using the largest cups he can find.

Once they’re steaming, Clint makes his way through the dark room, sits on the other side of the sofa, leaving roomy berth between himself and the man already sitting, still staring out of the window as he had been doing when Clint entered.

Steve looks down when Clint bumps the piping hot cup against his knee, accepting it with something that looks close to autopilot playing in his hands as he rests the base on his thighs and looks back to the window, which overlooks a twinkling, busy skyline.

“I’m not much of a coffee guy,” Steve says in a tone that probably means to be apologetic, but lacks a sincerity Clint’s grown used to from their All-American Hero.

Clint shrugs, taking a sip of his own.

“It’s not really about the coffee,” he replies, and he watches Steve struggle to recover from the twitch in his expression.

Steve looks down at the cup in his hands, clasping tightly at the heat between them, and Clint knows he’s made the right call, however caustically Steve wants to react to it.

“Guess not,” he says roughly. “Thanks, Barton.”

It’s distant, and about as far from grateful as the word can get, and Clint sips his coffee and joins the staring match out of the window without a response. In the silence, and the false solitude, he allows himself to imagine Katie-Kate and her stupid smiling terrier over in Brooklyn, curled up in the warmth, well-fed on pizza and protected from the cold. He allows himself to imagine his bed here, in Stark’s tower; a sleeping redhead who may or may not be there, waiting, just in case.

And, as the silence stretches out between them, it seems perhaps Steve collects some of the pieces of his lonely frustration back into himself, perhaps recognises Clint’s gesture for what it is, and not what he assumes it to be, because he slides a foot closer over the sofa cushions, so that their legs are a hair’s breadth from touching. Too far, then too close, in a heartbeat.

 _Steven Rogers, ladies and gentlemen,_ Clint thinks, a little unkindly, though he’d never voice it anyway.

He doesn’t chance another look to his left. He simply drinks his coffee while Steve soaks up the warmth from his own through his hands, and together they watch the stars battle the clouds, as New York City battles the night, and they wait for morning to wake, or sleepiness to claim them, whichever comes first.

*

Clint wakes up with a violent start, his breathing ragged and his chest full of ice shards, a strong hand on his arm that he rips away from.

“Sorry,” Steve says, ever so quietly, staggering back as Clint recoils from his touch.

He’s gone by the time Clint catches his breath.

*


	7. PART ONE: Chapter VI

*

** PART ONE **

** Chapter VI **

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

When Clint was thirteen, he broke a bone in his foot.

At least, that’s what the horse doctor from the circus Clint was living with at the time said happened. Sandy Clemmons, known strictly as _Doc_ amongst the circus folk, had wrapped the injury up tight and told him to be careful. He’d given their resident marksman, Trick Shot, a sharp look over the top of Clint’s head as he said it, like he knew he wouldn’t be adhered to.

Doc was scarce out of earshot when a bow landed in Clint’s lap.

“Daylight’s wasting, kid,” Trick Shot said. “You eat dinner or you’re in it.”

Even at thirteen, Clint had understood Trick Shot was mostly joking – they wouldn’t actually have _eaten_ him.

Nonetheless, almost twenty years later, the underlying sentiment remains a devil with claws deep in Clint Barton’s back: in this world, you are useful or you are useless, and there is no in between. If you aren’t being useful, you are by definition being useless.

As usual, Clint takes to suspension of active duty pretty terribly, and he’s got better sense than to deny it. Three days after Fury’s impossible-to-misinterpret orders to wait until Tuesday for so much as a whiff of a mission, and he’s managed to drive even Natasha to outright refusing to spar with him.

The day Natasha Romanoff declines an offer to kick his ass has to be the day Clint Barton checks his goddamn attitude.

Resolved to spread out his nuisances as widely as he can – and keen to remove himself from Natasha’s ire – Clint eventually finds himself taking up Bruce’s thinly veiled invitation from a few days ago to join him at work. The lights in the lab are less harsh on his sensitive eyes, and he brings a peace token in the form of a bag of hard sour candies, which seems to be the only exception to Bruce’s _no food in my lab_ law, which has thus far been laid down with extreme prejudice.

Brandishing the crumpled paper bag as a trophy, Clint deposits the candy with a clatter on the worktop, grins at the look Bruce gives him over the rim of his glasses, and promptly comes very close to shitting himself when a soft laugh erupts from behind him.

 _“Jesus,_ Capitano,” Clint chuffs with a laugh.

When he turns, he sees Steve sitting on a padded chair, his legs extended onto another chair in front of him. There’s a sketchbook in his lap, a pencil behind his ear and a pen in his hand, and –

“Damnit, beat me to it,” Clint grumbles, spotting the bag of sweets resting near Steve on a table.

“Afraid so, Hawkeye,” Steve says with an air of such false politeness Clint wants to ask if he salutes his uniform with that mouth.

It’s been a couple of days since Clint woke fuzzily to Steve’s gentle hand rousing him, the stammered apology from a meek Captain and an overwhelming absence before Clint could collect his downtrodden wits enough to accept, or more deservingly, apologise in return for whatever hissing anger he’d lashed out with in his sleep.

Steve, of course, displays nothing of this as he leans over to drag a computer chair by the arm next to him, patting the padding in invitation.

“By all means,” Bruce says lightly. “I’ve always thought a biochemistry lab would double excellently as a social cresh.”

“Great minds think alike, Doc,” Steve replies with a grin far sweeter than the sour candy he plucks from his own paper bag and tosses over Clint’s head. Bruce must catch it, because there’s no sound of it landing.

Clint slumps into his offered chair with an exaggerated groan, dropping his candies in his lap and taking in the room from his new angle. Bruce at his worktop, his glasses perched on his nose, his hair finger-ruffled, his jaw downright stubbly. The bright screens displaying incomprehensible molecules and DNA strands and who the hell else knows what. The gleaming surfaces. The vividly colour-coded boxes and drawers and walls.

Steve, his legs crossed at the ankle, his calves almost too big for his jeans, a sketchbook on his lap he makes no attempt to conceal. It’s Bruce, exactly as he is; greyscale and handsome and soft at all edges, the very opposite of his more infamous half. It makes Clint smile, and he’s still smiling when he catches Steve’s eye. Steve puts his index finger secretively to his lips, and Clint zips his own in response.

“Natasha finally kicked you out, huh?” Steve asks after a beat.

Clint doesn’t know whether to strike out or applaud.

Steve makes the decision for him, by shrugging one shoulder and looking positively adorable while doing it.

“She’s just worried about you.”

Clint can’t help the bemused expression that steals over his face at that one. What does Steve Rogers know of it? He’s known Nat less than a month. Master strategist and perfect soldier he might be, but not even he has learned the secret tells of Natasha Romanoff so easily.

“How’d you know that?” he asks reflexively, expecting a platitude about she’s Clint’s _friend,_ of course she’s worried, or maybe a reminder that he’s on stand-down, and she _should_ be worried, because SHIELD doesn’t trust him, or maybe –

“We all are,” Steve says easily, and doesn’t so much as glance up from his sketching.

The cool ready inclusiveness of it – _we all are ­_ – as if to say _I am,_ as if to say _your team is,_ is almost too much to bear. Clint’s mouth goes dry and he shrinks a little into his cushions. He’d expected to be intimidated by Steve Rogers’ physical presence, the power in his punches or the hardness of his orders or the brightness of his righteousness. He’s blindsided by this intimidatingly _soft_ display.

Across the lab, Bruce is clinking things up and down rhythmically and when he catches Clint’s eye, he offers the tiniest smile Clint’s ever seen.

“No need,” Clint retorts breezily, his breaths harsh and large in his lungs as he ignores the twinge of his heartstrings. “SHIELD wouldn’t’ve let me out of lockdown if I hadn’t at least passed a basic psych eval, you know.”

This time, Steve _does_ look up from his sketch. He puts his pencil down decidedly, clasping his hands on top of the paper and looks Clint square in the face. Decades in his eyes, Steve looks twenty-six from afar but he looks a hundred years old in the depths of his stare.

“Don’t wilfully misunderstand me, Clint,” he commands, the way he hasn’t sounded since there were aliens pouring through a hole in the heavens a mile above where they’re sitting.

A disgraceful hunger rips through Clint’s belly, followed immediately by a shame that pulls his eyes to his knees.

Steve reaches over, cautious and decisive in one fell swoop. When he takes one of Clint’s hands, the very tips of his fingers are pinpricks of a fever that will never burn out. There’s a pause, an intake of breath, and Clint steels himself for whatever it is Steve’s about to say, or even, God forbid, _ask._

It doesn’t come.

Steve squeezes his wrist once, then lets go, returning his attention to his sketch as if he’s already forgotten the reprimand that has left Clint’s lungs tight and his belly squirming.

Clint peeks up through his eyelashes, inspecting the melancholy smile on Steve’s face.

“You, uh,” Clint clears his throat and fidgets, a little embarrassed in a way he doesn’t recognise in himself. “You planning any more sightseeing excursions?”

Bruce, the traitor, turns away, and there’s no mistaking the tremble in his shoulders from his silent laughter. Clint imagines plucking a sour candy from the bag and tossing it directly into the test tube that’s uncovered in the corner of the room.

If Steve can sense any of the awkwardness that is honestly bleeding from Clint like a pheromone at this point, he doesn’t mention it. He turns his paper ninety degrees, to better shade in a curl of hair around Bruce’s ear, and makes a noncommittal shrug of one shoulder.

“Not really. I’m supposed to be heading up to D.C. at some point for a proper SHIELD induction, but gosh darnit, I just can’t fathom these new-fangled cellular devices, so I keep on missing the Director’s calls.”

If someone had told Clint how much of a goddamn troll Steve Rogers was, he might have paid better attention in history class at school. He cracks a laugh, and admires Steve’s half-dimples, and sits a little heavier in his seat.

“Anybody taken you to the Smithsonian yet?” Clint asks.

Steve quirks an eyebrow at his page.

“Hmm?” he asks, in a clear negative.

Clint sighs. Disgraceful.

“There’s a Captain America exhibition. Been a staple favourite for years. They’ve probably spruced it up a bit since you got thawed. I’m surprised they didn’t invite for an opening ceremony.”

To his surprise, a grimace passes over Steve’s face, followed closely by a flash of a toothy smile.

“Oh, right. Yeah.” Steve lets out a shy chuckle. “Yeah, I might’a got something in the mail about it.”

“Now, I _know_ they had envelopes in Ye Olden Times, Rogers.”

“Oh _boy,_ I know, but I got this awful allergy to government mail. Breaks me out in hives.”

“Shame the serum didn’t clear that up for you,” Bruce cuts in with a smirk, and Steve’s grin broadens.

“Darndest shame,” he agrees with wide, morose eyes the colour of glee and glitter.

Clint laughs, helping himself to a candy. When Bruce opens his mouth, his hands full of equipment, Clint throws one over. It lands with a clack right between his teeth, and Bruce shows it off through hollowed cheeks, looking pleased as punch.

A baby bird sound chirrups from beside him, and Steve is looking hopefully at Clint’s hand, despite having his own bag of sour candies right next to him. With a grin, Clint tosses another candy as high into the air as he can without smacking the ceiling, and Steve lunges left to snatch it in his mouth on its descent. He makes a loud, displeased sound at the taste, and crunches it in three bites that make Clint’s own teeth ache in sympathy.

The drawing in Steve’s lap is mostly done. He drops his pencil on a small table near him, and holds it out to inspect, glancing at Clint for approval. Clint, who can draw a straight line to an exact millimetre on demand but can barely manage a smiley face without making it wonky, can only nod, astounded.

Despite this amateur’s nonverbal response, Steve seems pleased by the endorsement. He flicks the book shut in a flurry of pages, and Clint can only glimpse a stream of grey shading in a flurry of shapes before the cover is closed. A rectangle plain brown card, unmarked but for a little _37_ in the top righthand corner.

“Smithsonian, huh?” Steve asks with a shrewd look.

“Uhh, yeah,” Clint replies.

“Want to go?”

Clint feels the bemused grin twist his mouth all around.

“Wha – now?”

Steve makes a pointed glance at the watch around his wrist – a chunky, classic looking piece, the likes of which a young Clint Barton would have relished stealing in a perfect sleight of hand in a subway station – to make a show of the time.

“Might be cutting it a little fine for today,” Steve says. “I was thinking tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Clint repeats, a little stupidly, because what exactly does he have on his social calendar? He’s not allowed in HQ before Tuesday, and somehow, it’s only _Saturday._ “Yeah – um. Yeah. I could – I could. If you need the company.”

He doesn’t give voice the pit of sickly worry that gnaws in his gut, at the thought of being let loose in the world all day, exposed to the elements without Tasha, or Rumlow, or anyone who –

Maybe it’s the seamless shade of blue, or the long eyelashes, or the crease of a smile about them – but something in Steve’s watchful eyes quietens the anxiety that’s busying Clint’s thoughts. He nods, one final agreement, and sinks back into his seat, resolved. He can manage for a day. He can silence the whispers and remain blind to the shadows in the corners of the room. He can stand next to Steve Rogers and not be crippled by the weight of responsibility that seems to rest upon the good Captain’s Atlas-broad shoulders.

“Well then,” Steve says, and with a rapid movement flicks his hand upwards, throwing –

“Gah!” Clint yelps, and topples backwards over his chair in order to catch the sour candy in his wide open mouth as it flies.

Steve’s laugh is rusty with disuse, and so is Bruce’s, but they fit together, in this cramped corner of the lab, where the world is very small, and tastes of poison apple sours, and smells of the graphite on Steve’s hands.

*

**a mission**

*

_STRATEGIC HOMELAND INTERVENTION, ENFORCEMENT and LOGISTICS DIVISION (S.H.I.E.L.D.)_

_\--/--/2010 – --/--/2010_

_STRIKE TEAM DELTA: H------ AND B---- W----_

_ MISSION DISRUPTION_PROTOCOL J ENACTED _

_Package collected on schedule in ----- SLOVAKIA. Interception at rendezvous SJB—H—4—E led to critical failure. Package terminated by unknown shooter. DELTA STRIKE offline._

_Reported damage (ph4G.73) and injury (ph4G.16) filed under mission log 5L4._

_Ex-fil: Nil_

_Debrief: --/--/2010 (ph4G.1.13)_

_KEYLOG | H------: leaky pipe in the fixtures, source unknown_

*

**said the magpie to the rook**

*

These are the things Clint knows first, every time he wakes up: where he is, why he’s there, and that Phil Coulson is dead.

It’s an insidious piece of knowledge, the last of the three. Crueller for the moments when it lingers out of reach, in the drifts from dreams, or the slow blink of daylight, only to creep into view like a storm on the horizon.

Clint wakes up soundlessly in a dark room on a springy mattress under a thick duvet. He lies on his back with his hands hooked under his pillow, knees cocking and stretching. He opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling.

_Stark Tower apartment. Lying low until Tuesday. Phil Coulson is dead._

He closes his eyes, and for a brief moment considers going back to sleep. Only, then he’ll have the realisation all over again when he wakes up. Once a day is punishment enough.

Instead, Clint kicks the covers off and gets moving. Hot shower, comfy clothes, warmed up joints and limbs. He wriggles his toes into a pair of battered sneakers and trudges down to the communal kitchen to find it dark and empty, yet pleasantly warm nonetheless, as if his arrival had been anticipated to the moment.

“You’re the man, JARVIS,” Clint mutters under his breath, to which he grins at the responding _“As are you, Agent Barton,”_ that seems to emanate from the very walls.

Some of the most absurd of Tony’s contraptions that can be found lying around the tower might make Clint do a double take, however not even the fanciest of coffee machines have proven a match against a tired Clint Barton. Not even a re-customised, Starkified Keurig.

So, one cup down and another one half sipped, Clint finally loosens himself into the day ahead, one eye on the dimmed windows and another on the door, from which he can soon enough hear the approach of –

 _“Clap on!”_ Tony shouts to JARVIS, who promptly turns the lights on full as commanded.

Clint takes another drink of coffee, without fully turning.

“Good morning, Mister Stark,” he drawls.

Tony lets out a sigh of exaggerated defeat.

“No sneaking up on a sneak, I guess,” he says.

“You know –” Clint begins.

He turns to take in Tony, who’s wearing a confusing combination of sleek, fitted dress pants, shiny leather shoes with undone suspenders hanging around his waist, and a ratty AC/DC shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His hair is slicked back to perfection. There are dried smudges of engine oil all over his hands.

Before Clint can comment on any of this, however, Tony holds up a mucky finger as a silencer, in precise imitation of Ms Pepper Potts herself, and double taps his earpiece.

“Matthew, buddy. Dennis. Whoever you are. I do so love our little pow-wows. You have a very soothing tone. Have you considered a career in ASMR tapes? It would be a smart move, because let me tell you, Dennis, if you keep working for Senator Stern much longer, you’re going to lose a lot more friends than just me. Not that we are – friends – but we could be, maybe, if you weren’t doing such a fine impression of the Mouth of Sauron. Trust me. Your predecessor. Gabby? Debby? Danny? Something. She was such a bright young thing when she started and now, well. I think we sent flowers, for the funeral held for her self-esteem and sanity. Are we on the same page here?”

Clint knows a lot about learned behaviours; the involuntary ones picked up too young to shake, the cultivated ones carefully crafted by a precise mind. Tony Stark is one of the only people whose lines seems to blur, where those two personalities collide, that Clint has ever known. The rapid fire speech, the nuanced flippancy, the cool demeanour he affects as he raids his kitchen and jibes at a poor Senatorial aide.

It’s a brilliant, terrible thing to behold.

But Tony isn’t done, and Clint simply leans back on his kitchen stool, cradling his coffee on his thighs.

“Next time Stern would like to chat about Avengering, or SI manufactures, or meet-and-greets with Captain Icepop, you are advised to show him this…”

As he trails off briefly, Tony pulls out his phone and types a quick message, which he sends with a flourish. There’s a bored glint in his eye as he purses his lips, rooting through the fridge and pulling out a bag of kale. He closes his eyes suddenly, brows shooting upwards on his forehead.

“Dennis. Compadre. Oh, my apologies, Wesley. _Wesley?_ Are you sure? OK, well. _Wes._ That’s my final offer. I hope the next time I hear your voice, it’s whispering sweet tidbits about rainfall and stock prices and long, luxurious baths in my ear on my way to sleep.”

With that, Tony pulls his earpiece out, drops it on the worktop, and sets about making an entirely green-produce based smoothie.

Clint considers making a Hulk joke, but without Bruce to roll his eyes and Steve to frown disapprovingly, it seems wasted.

“You’re up early, sparky,” Tony says with an accompanying side-eye.

“As are you,” Clint retorts, returning to his coffee.

“Technically,” Tony replies. “I’m up _late._ JARVIS and I are running human trials on the age old phenomenon: do board meetings get more bearable, or less bearable, if you’re coasting on the back of twenty-four hours without sleep.”

 _“Actually, sir,”_ JARVIS interrupts, as polite and dry as ever. _“You have been awake for forty-five hours. I was also unaware we were engaged in an experiment. I was under the impression you were simply avoiding sleep.”_

Tony jabs the blender button hard, mouthing _wow_ with a betrayed expression.

Clint, who has zero interest in trading nightmares with Tony Stark, simply raises his mug as a toast to poor dreams and drains it.

They are saved, both of them, from their shared weak smiles by the appearance of Steve Rogers, looking the absolute least _Captain America_ Clint might have ever seen him. His jeans are loose, and he’s found what must be the only sweatshirt in his wardrobe that isn’t two sizes too small for his bulk. There’s a ridiculous cap on his head, a pair of bulky boots on his feet, but that’s not it.

He’s almost – bristly, around the jawline. Had he been like that yesterday? Clint can’t remember.

A laugh bubbles up out of his throat, conjuring the faintest sheen of pink over Steve’s nose.

“Yankees, Cap, are you serious?” Tony chips in, pouring his smoothie and grinning ear to ear.

“Best disguise there is,” Steve says, without entirely joking by the sounds of it, as if it’s enough to believe Captain America wouldn’t be caught dead in Yankees merchandise. He might actually be right, too. “You ready?”

This, he asks of Clint, who hops off his stool in reply, leaving the mug in the sink just to grin when Tony starts barking about cleaning rates and domestic habits. Steve smirks, eyebrows rising on his face in mocking scoff.

“What sort of Avenger doesn’t do his own washing up?”

He sidesteps Clint’s elbow neatly as they head for the elevator.

_“Excuse me? Landlord speaking! Where are you going? I haven’t installed your tracking devices yet!”_

“Don’t worry, Tony dear,” Clint shouts back, while Steve asks JARVIS to take them down to B4. “I’ll keep an eye on Spanglepants!”

“And I’ll keep an eye on the delinquent!” Steve shouts, just before the doors slide closed.

“What!” Clint cries, punching Steve’s arm and laughing. Steve grins back, all lightness and glee, like the fresh air they haven’t even stepped out to, yet. “You are at _least_ as much of a delinquent as I am. I’ve read your comic strips.”

Steve pulls a face of exaggerated displeasure.

“Oh in that case, you don’t know the half of it, Hawkeye.”

“Is that why we’re really going to the Smithsonian?” Clint asks shrewdly, throwing out a _Thanks, J-Dog!_ when they reach Basement Four, exiting the elevator and shoving shoulders together. “You want to correct a few less than minor discrepancies about your criminal record? Wait, _do_ you have a criminal record?”

Steve, sparing one longing glance at his Harley-Davidson before making instead for the most discreet car he can find, which is still probably the fanciest machine Clint’s ever seen, widens his eyes innocently, batting his eyelashes as he swings open the driver’s side door.

“A record would involve getting _caught,_ Agent Barton. Surely you know that?”

Before Clint can demand further information, he’s ducked into the car, and is already revving the engine by the time Clint clambers into the passenger side.

*

The Smithsonian isn’t as busy as it could be for a Saturday, all things considered.

Pressing crowds are a nuisance, but they provide a sort of cover of their own. A sea of excited children and sceptical teenagers, bored parents, harried parents, relieved parents, despairing parents. Amateur experts and owl-eyed newcomers. People are too busy avoiding each other to actually look at those around them.

It’s about as close to invisible as they’re likely to get, as they stroll through the entry, passing smirks like notes beneath the huge _Welcome Home, Cap!_ banner that adorns the exhibition entrance. It’s gaudy and bright, bold as the comic originals that are displayed along the corridor in vacuum sealed glass cases.

“Oh, no,” Steve sighs under his breath.

“Ooh, lookie!” Clint cries with a frilly clapping flutter of his hands. “Captain _‘Murka_ at the Battle of Britain! Rogers vs the entire Luftwaffe. Naturally.”

“What?” Steve chokes, eyes widening as he approaches, looking scandalised. “What, why am I – flying a British plane? When was this?”

Clint peers over the fine print of the blocky, square coloured picture.

“Ah, of course. 1950. They did a special series of them, five years after you, uh. Didn’t die.”

“Ain’t that just swell,” Steve huffs exaggeratedly, and Clint is almost worried he’s actually upset by the historical inaccuracy except – his face softens, creased with a despairing kind of amusement. “They got me fighting in Korea, too? Vietnam?”

“Oh, sure,” Clint says breezily, slapping Steve’s shoulder and bullying him further into the exhibit. “You even showed up in a special episode of M*A*S*H. Loads of people complained because the writers had you getting drunk and playing poker with Hawkeye and –”

Steve, who is visibly and rightfully baffled, raises his eyebrows, looking Clint up and down as if to ask, _Hawkeye?_

Which, well, fair.

“It wasn’t – no – it was this TV show, or, uh, book. Film. You know what? Never mind. It was great. Hawkeye was a badass. No, that isn’t where my name comes from! Come on. Just – stop laughing and come on, will you?”

Clint hunches his shoulders and trudges through the crowd. He can feel a red stain of embarrassment rising up his throat, pooling in his cheeks. He feels almost flustered, by Steve Rogers’ sparkly laughter following him, by the teasing fingers that hook in his sweatshirt hood and yank him left and right, like a dopey golden retriever latching onto a frisbee.

Pushed on my Steve’s shoving laughter and Clint’s personal humiliation – he is _way_ cooler than Alan Alda, _thank you very much_ – they enjoy another twenty minutes of scoffing and giggling like schoolkids at the back of class. Steve has a silent and red faced conniption over a display of artwork somebody must have scrounged from his old art school days, and gets a little wet-eyed at the dedication to his mother, Sarah Rogers, along with all the other nurses who died following gruelling, terrible work in the TB wards.

They avoid some of the more popular sides of the room, like the display of old and replicated uniforms lined up, with intricately detailed artwork of all the commandos behind them. Clint can see the nervous back and forth of Steve’s gaze, catching and recatching on them, and he doesn’t think he’s inventing the way Steve’s attention tracks back to the replica of the blue long coat that would have been worn by one Sergeant James Barnes.

In fact, Clint is more than prepared to do a tactical retreat, cutting the far east corner of the room, in order to spare Steve the sight of one of the less palatable displays, however Steve, eagle-eyed and a dog with a bone, spots it from a mile off. He’s across the room before Clint can do anything more than snatch at his sweater and follow after him.

The glass cabinet is tall, sparsely laid. Front and centre is a crumpled, hand-written, smudged letter that begins _Steve,_ middles in at _Don’t be a stupid punk_ and signs off with _Be safe, pal, Bucky._

It’s probably not the only letter that Captain America scavengers managed to dig out of long lost hidey holes over the years, but Clint can tell why the Smithsonian would pick it for their exhibit.

Raw, unadulterated care shines out of the tiny letter, better than anything else Clint has seen so far. He feels foolish, not to have thought about it before this moment. Did Steve even know they had this stuff?

Clint peeks sideways at Steve, to see the deep frown lines carved into his face. Uneasy sympathy bubbles in Clint’s gut. He tries to think of something to say, tries, painfully, to think what _Phil_ might say. He was good at this sort of thing. He was _good._

His breath catches in his throat, and Clint feels an overwhelming panic tear at his lungs momentarily. Standing here, in the middle of a Captain America exhibition, next to an angry and hurting Steve Rogers, thinking about Phil, Phil Coulson –

_Phil Coulson is dead –_

It takes a miracle of self-restraint to stop Clint from reaching out and simply taking hold of Steve’s hand, just to let him know. Let him know he’s not alone, not –

“How did they get this?” Steve asks.

He sounds _shattered._ His voice cracks as his finger stabs at the glass and Clint looks down, the words of the letter blurring in his panic only, Steve isn’t pointing at the letter. Steve’s pointing at something to the far right of the cabinet.

It’s another piece of paper, this one also crumpled, but with neat crucifix letter folds in it, too, as if it had been kept safely squared away. It’s a pencil drawing, with exquisite details that Clint recognises from Steve’s sketch of Bruce yesterday, of a young woman. She’s smiling, closer to cheeky than demure, her hair a little out of place.

There’s a tiny _g._ sign next to the picture, and Clint glances down to check the info strip along the bottom.

_Hand graphite drawing, likely by Steve Rogers, of Rebecca Barnes, twin sister of James Barnes._

Steve is staring so hard at the picture, Clint’s a little worried the paper’s going to be set alight.

“They uh,” Clint says, clearing his throat. “A lot of your stuff, and uh, and Barnes’. It got raided, or, or sold on the black market. People paid a lot for that sort of stuff. It went everywhere.”

Howard Stark, too, Clint thinks might have had a hand in it. Though he doesn’t know that for sure, and he doesn’t particularly want to stoke the flames of discontent that still occasionally spark between Steve and Tony. There’s enough bad blood to go around as it is.

Steve shakes his head.

“No, this wasn’t –” he looks around wildly, in search of something, which he finds.

This time, instead of stalking off alone, however, Steve grabs Clint’s arm tight enough to bruise, tugging him along.

“Jesus, Steve, will you – what is it?”

Steve, however, is a Captain on a mission.

“Hello,” he says very charmingly to a young woman, who is standing in a Visitor Assistant uniform, wearing a badge that reads _Cally_ and has a radio clipped to her belt. “I need to speak to somebody in charge, right now.”

“Oh fuck,” Clint mutters under his breath, casting his gaze left and right to clock how many people have already noticed something weird. Twelve, so far. Twelve. Just great. Just _great._

Cally, meanwhile, seems very flustered by the plus six foot man towering over her petite frame.

“Um, I can – can I help you with something, sir?” she squeaks.

Realising, thankfully, that he is several hundred pounds of intimidation and firepower, Steve backs up half a step, trodding on Clint’s foot in the process and promptly ignoring his yelp of pain.

“I’m sorry, I just mean – I really need to speak to a manager. Preferably a curator. But I’ll make do with a manager for now.”

Cally’s eyes, rimmed with eyeliner and a little bloodshot, narrow suspiciously as she takes in Steve’s face. Clint, torn between his sore toes, the _seventeen_ people who have so far glanced their way, and the hulking mass that is Captain America in a Yankee Cap, crosses his fingers and begs for mercy from whatever deity is watching.

Maybe Thor will hear, and come help.

“I can, um. Are you? OK. I can show to the manager, sir,” Cally says, turning on her heel and leading the way through a side exit that leads back to the main entrance. She waves off a colleague who has started making their way over with a smile and a flick of her fingers.

Clint stays half a step behind Steve, wondering idly if he’ll still be allowed back to work on Tuesday if he lets Captain America get banned from the Smithsonian for staff intimidation.

Just as she reaches a door marked _Private: Staff Only,_ Cally swings around, her hands planted on her hips.

“A Yankee Cap, are you kidding me? Do you have _no_ team loyalty, Captain Rogers?”

There is a hitched breath moment of hesitation, before a nervous laugh bursts out of Clint’s tight lungs. Even Steve manages a chuffing snort.

“I appreciate your help, Cally,” is all Steve actually says, although he does respectfully remove the Yankee Cap.

Cally, mollified by the gesture, gives Steve a nod before leading them through the door.

Her manager, it turns out, is a _Real Big Fan._

His name is Ken, and he owns a _lot_ of Captain America original comics, four of which he’s loaned to the museum for this very exhibition. He’s simply _thrilled_ to have Captain-Rogers-America-Sir visiting, which is a double-edged blade of convenience and impracticality.

Whatever has got Steve so torn up over that picture, it’s enough to promise an entire signing event with Ken, by the sounds of it, before Ken agrees to set up a meeting with the lead curators.

“You know, Mr-Captain-Rogers-Sir. A lot of these artefacts have been rescued from misuse and destruction. It’s been our pleasure-honour to-to-to protect your legacy. What a real honour. You can go now, Cally, dear. Thank you.”

They’re in a staff rec room, and Cally is pouring several coffees and rooting through a jar of sweets and lollipops. At her manager’s dismissal, she simply points to the clock on the wall.

“It’s my break now, anyway. Here you go. Didn’t Melissa call you on the radio just now?”

Cally hands Clint a coffee, and Steve. Ken, torn between his job and his childhood hero, flusters about Melissa before bustling out of the door with a promise to return _imminently._

Clint, for his part, drains his coffee and lets out a sigh of relief. He does _not_ envy Steve his legion of adoring fans.

Steve’s shoulders have yet to shrink down from his earlobes, and he’s yet to lose his scowl, but he does thank Cally gratefully for the coffee, immediately cradling it between his palms without sipping. Cally holds out the tub of sweets, and Steve refuses. Clint helps himself to four, because this seems like it’s going to take a while.

Cally perches on a desk, her own coffee half drunk, and swings her legs as she scrutinises Steve and Clint with equal interest.

“Officially, the museum exhibition is made up entirely of loans and donations,” she says with a hard edge to her voice. “But I’ve got a friend in the development and patronage department. She says a whole bunch of funding went into buying out Captain America merchandise from the black market. People pay a lot of money for a piece of you.”

Steve’s jaw tightens, and he nods in understanding. Cally looks at Clint. He offers her a smile, which she returns weakly.

“Aren’t you friends with Tony Stark?” she asks, abruptly.

Clint blinks, glancing at Steve and back at Cally.

“Why?” Steve asks.

Cally shrugs, swinging her legs again and pulling out a foil covered Reese’s Cup.

“I just thought, you know. He has more money than God. He could probably buy out the whole museum, if they kicked up a fuss about keeping your stuff.”

“Hm,” Clint laughs, toasting Cally with a raising of his coffee cup. “Kid’s got smarts. He could probably get it back for you.”

He doesn’t specifically mention the picture, but Steve’s shoulders do loosen a fraction, so Clint assumes he’s caught his drift. He wonders why that picture is so important to Steve. More important than his old uniform, than the original photograph of the Howling Commandos. More important than a letter written to him on the front line by his best friend. A picture of his best friend’s twin sister.

His sister – was that it? Was that the missing piece of the puzzle of Steve’s closeness to the Barnes family? Was Steve in love with Becca Barnes?

To be perfectly honest, Clint always kind of thought Steve Rogers would turn out to be –

The door swings open, and Ken breezes back in. Cally, whose mouth is now zipped up tight, leaps down, rinses out the last of her coffee, and leaves with a half-mocking curtsy that Clint frankly respects twice as much as all Manager Ken’s adulation.

Steve, Clint notices, watches after the door that swings shut behind her, for more than a moment after she’s vanished.

“We should go,” he murmurs, tugging at Steve’s sleeve.

Steve, his jaw square and his eyes tired, nods, defeated.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah,” he replies.

Taking his hand is probably still a step too far.

Clint takes hold of his warm, thrumming wrist, instead.

*

**a confession**

*

“Will you do it?” Phil asked, from his seat across the desk.

Clint stared at the satellite images of the weird, destructive mass that had plopped down in New Mexico overnight.

He thought about his bed in Brooklyn. How nice it would be, to lie in it, just for one night. He hadn’t been home in months.

He sighed, deeply.

“I’m only doing it for you, you know,” he said.

Phil grinned, bags under his eyes and stars in them, too.

“I know,” he replied. “I appreciate it.”

Clint dragged his feet on his way out of the door. His fingers were brushing the handle when Phil corrected himself.

“I appreciate you, Clint Barton.”

The smile was invasive, unbeatable, forcing its way over Clint’s face. His forehead knocked into the door as he closed his eyes, basking in the confession.

“I appreciate you too, Phil Coulson.”

*


End file.
